Truth: A Poet’s Raw Material with Kathy Fagan (via Zoom)

Dickinson famously wrote: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” And Audre Lorde: “Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.” Our workshop today is based on the premise that poets, in telling their truth, weave narrative and lyric, the personal and political, autobiography and history in their poems and hybrid works. Examples provided include poems or portions of poems by Layli Long Soldier, Terese Svoboda, Tarfia Faizullah, Jean Valentine, Robert Hayden, Omotara James, and Linda Gregg, among others. We will workshop one poem by each of you through the double lenses of “truth” and craft. Based on your workshop poems and poems by those mentioned above, students might go on to practice braiding techniques and other poetic strategies in their own truth-telling work.

Kathy Fagan’s sixth poetry collection, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, is Bad Hobby (Milkweed Editions, 2022), available both in print and audio. Her previous book, Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017), was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award. Fagan’s work has appeared in venues such as The Atlantic, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Best American Poetry. A 2023-24 Guggenheim Fellow, Fagan is the recipient of NEA, Ingram Merrill, Greater Columbus Arts Council, and Ohio Arts Council grants, in addition to Frost Place and MacDowell residencies. Fagan co-founded the MFA Program in Creative Writing at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, for which she served two terms as Director and over twenty years as Poetry Editor of The Journal. An ASC Distinguished Professor of English, she teaches poetry and co-edits the annual The Journal/OSU Press Wheeler Poetry Prize Series.