Hotel Real de Minas
Camino Viejo Al Panteón 1
San Antonio
33700 San Miguel de Allende,
Mexico
Comedians, like poets, are often preoccupied with speaking the unspeakable. Both jokes and poems compress a great deal of energy into small packages, and while laughter might be the immediate end, in the right hands, the result can be transcendence.
As the artist David Shrigley put it: “The opposite of humor is not seriousness; the opposite of humor is incompetence.”
In this workshop, we will read the work of James Wright, Wislawa Szymborska, Bill Knott, Jamaal May, Patricia Lockwood, Wendy Cope, and Billy Collins, in our examination of how many of the poetic techniques used in lyric poetry can echo those used in joke structures.
Michael Bazzett
Michael Bazzett is the author of You Must Remember This, which received the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, The Interrogation, and most recently The Echo Chamber. He is also the translator of The Popol Vuh, the first English verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, which was named one a New York Times Best Book of 2018. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Ploughshares, The Sun, and Best New Poets. He is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and lives in Minneapolis.