Making and Being Made: A Generative Workshop

In the poem "Go to the Limits of Your Longing," Rainer Maria Rilke says "God speaks to us as he makes us," which begs the question: How do we listen and respond? If religious rituals have historically provided people with a way to access the divine, how can poets use structure, constraints, and received forms to write their experiences of faith, doubt, and God's presence? In this generative workshop, we'll read poems created using formal constraints that address spiritual experiences, and we'll think together about how these structures might help us get out of our own way and allow for surprise—or even divine inspiration.