Airy citadels: A poetry workshop (reading and writing) to celebrate the 220th anniversary of the birth of John Keats

Keats-Shelley House - Saturday, 31 October, 2015 - 10 am – 6 pm

Total Price per student: €45  

Numbers are limited so please contact us to reserve a place

“It appears to me that almost any man may, like the spider, spin from his own innards his own airy citadel,” John Keats wrote in a letter to John Hamilton Reynolds. That literally visceral image is an apt description for our pursuits during this day-long workshop, celebrating the birth of John Keats.

We will spend the morning reading and discussing some of Keats’s poems, both the “greatest hits” and some of the lesser-known works, as well as taking some inspirational thoughts and images from his letters.

There will be a break from 1 pm until 3 pm, at which time participants are encouraged to have a light lunch in the area and then spend time working on some original writing, inspired by the morning’s texts and conversations.

From 3 pm until 6 pm, we will reconvene for a workshop discussion of the participants’ own work. Participants are encouraged to dive right in with new work that will have been produced during the break; they are also welcome to bring along work that has already been written.

As Keats wrote, "Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced" (in a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 1819). Please join us for the enjoyable and educational experience of examining poetry from the inside-out, and then making real the work of your own experience and imagination.

Moira Egan has been teaching literature and creative writing for more than twenty years. The author of six poetry collections (most recently Botanica Arcana/Strange Botany, 2014, and Hot Flash Sonnets, 2013), she is finishing work on her seventh book, Synæsthesium. Moira’s work has won many awards and has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the U.S. and abroad, including Best American Poetry 2008; Measure for Measure; The Book of Form;and Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics. With her husband, Damiano Abeni, she has published more than a dozen volumes in translation in Italy, by authors such as Ashbery, Barth, Bender, Ferlinghetti, Hecht, Strand, and others. Their translations of Italian poems into English are published in many U.S. journals and in the FSG Book of 20th Century Italian Poetry and in Patrizia Cavalli’s My Poems Will Not Change the World (FSG). 

Moira has held fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (as Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellow); St. James Cavalier Centre for Creativity, Malta; the Civitella Ranieri Center; the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center; and the James Merrill House in Stonington, CT. She holds degrees from Bryn Mawr College, Johns Hopkins University, and Columbia University, where James Merrill chose her graduate manuscript for the David Craig Austin Prize.