“Waiting, Listening and Jumping the Gun: A Poetry Workshop with Jim Peterson. Generative Writing Workshop. (Poetry-focused but all genres welcome.) Presented Via Zoom. $50.00 fee. Limited to 12 participants.
Two concepts I’d like to work with are Negative Capability* and the Vatic Voice**. More than concepts, these are directly experienceable “moments” in the living creative process of any artist. Courting these moments is crucial for the poet who wants to write poems that reach beyond the limitations and boundaries of the poet’s mindset. The personal in poetry (and in any art) is important, but when the impersonal, or universal, intersects with the personal, something new and surprising can arise.
Jim Peterson's poems have won multiple awards and his plays have been produced in regional and college theaters. Until his retirement in 2013, he was Coordinator of Creative Writing at Randolph College and later the Pearl S. Buck Writer-in-Residence there in 2017. Years earlier, he founded the poetry journal Kudzu and was editor of The Devil’s Millhopper poetry magazine and press. He taught for fifteen years in the University of Nebraska Omaha Low-Res MFA Program in Creative Writing. His newest poetry collection is Towheaded Stone Thrower, his tenth book overall, including eight collections of poetry, a novel, and a collection of short stories.