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The Things Themselves: Poetry
$215
“The most sensuous poets are the ones I trust the most,” says the poet Jorie Graham, citing the way that a word like “justice” can mean a thousand things to a thousand people while a word like “salt” has a much smaller range of possible associations. This workshop will focus our attention on the world of the senses and how writing from our senses can sharpen, heighten, and expand our poetry and our relationship with the world, offering a more empathetic and deeper engagement with each other and with the living earth.
The title of this workshop is a line from a Lucille Clifton poem. We’ll use this poem and a range of others as lenses to consider the ways our cultural and ecological moment is an invitation to widened wonder and love. This workshop is open to everyone. No prior experience with writing or reading poetry is needed or expected. We will talk, read, and write together. You’ll receive a bounty of readings and prompts to inspire your writing in the workshop and beyond.
Access Program
We want our writing classes and seminars to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access Program offers writing class and seminar tuitions at a reduced rate. Most writing classes have at least one access spot available.
Please apply here for access rate tuition. Contact Susan Moore at susan@literary-arts.org if you have questions.
Liaison position
Every in-person class and seminar at Literary Arts has one liaison position. Liaisons perform specific duties for each class meeting. If you are a liaison for a class or seminar, the full amount of your tuition is covered by Literary Arts.
Apply here for the liaison position.
Daniela Molnar
Daniela Naomi Molnar is a poet and artist who creates with color, water, language, and place. She makes pigments from plants, bones, stones, and specific waters—materials that carry the memory of the places they come from—and uses them to make sculptures, paintings, installations, and poems. Her debut book, CHORUS won the 2024 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. PROTOCOLS: An Erasure (2025) was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Both books grow out of the practices at the heart of this class. Her newest book, Memory of a Larger Mind, written on glaciers in Alaska and the Arctic, will be published in November 2026. She founded the Art + Ecology program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2016 and helped start and run the backcountry artist residency Signal Fire from 2008 to 2023. She lives in Portland, where the forest meets the city.
