A Nature Poem is an Elegy with Tyler Michael Jacobs

To write a nature a poem is to grieve nature. We already have poems that capture the beauty of nature and how it once was. The importance of capturing nature today is to see it as it is and how it might one day be.

Naturally, we must move away from the traditional pastoral that romanticizes nature to some perversion of it as only we can experience, feel, and understand.

In this workshop, we will explore the contemporary pastoral from contemporary writers to see how the past and the present blend so well that it captures, possibly, a bleakness moving forward into some stark future only we can imagine.

At the end of the workshop, we will meditate on our own relationship with nature as we’ve moved through time. We will sit and write from an imagined future that pulls from our current experiences. Then, we’ll share our work. We’ll…