Ethical Distances with Joshua Burton

I’m interested in measuring the distances between poets, their subjects and audience as a way to examine a poet’s moral responsibility in all directions.

     Poems should be daring and take risks that push the boundaries of human understanding and empathy.

     But where is the edge of that boundary where a poet might misrepresent or understand the subjects they are hoping to be in healthy conversation with? This might not only happen in persona writing, but in any writing that seeks to touch subjects and subject matter that requires tender and careful handling in order to capture truth without enacting further harm.

     In this workshop, I hope to create dialogue on a poem’s success and potential mishandling of these topics, as a way for us to learn how to best handle these topics ourselves in our own work. How can we take risks and even…