Photo of the featured reader outlined with a white line and displayed over a light blue background. Beneath the photo are the words "Open Mouth Presents: A Workshop with Mag Gabbert." Availability of sign language interpretation is indicated by the presence of an icon showing two hands signing in the bottom left corner. Photo: The poet Mag Gabbert is visible from the chest up; she sits in a shadowy interior room with a bookcase blurred in the background. She smiles with a very slightly open mouth and wears red lipstick, gold hoop earrings, and a black tank top. Photo by Cara Eliz Photo. SPONSORS: Support for Open Mouth Literary Center is provided, in part, by the Arkansas Arts Council, an agency of the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage, and Tourism, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from our supporters on Patreon.

Building with Concrete:A Workshop with Mag Gabbert

Photo of the featured reader outlined with a white line and displayed over a light blue background. Beneath the photo are the words "Open Mouth Presents: A Workshop withMag Gabbert." Availability of sign language interpretation is indicated by the presence of an icon showing two hands signing in the bottom left corner.

Photo: The poet Mag Gabbert is visible from the chest up; she sits in a shadowy interior room with a bookcase blurred in the background. She smiles with a very slightly open mouth and wears red lipstick, gold hoop earrings, and a black tank top. Photo by Cara Eliz Photo.
SPONSORS: Support for Open Mouth Literary Center is provided, in part, by the Arkansas Arts Council, an agency of the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage, and Tourism, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from our supporters on Patreon.

Join us on Sunday, February 12, 2023 at 2:00pm Central for a generative workshop with featured poet Mag Gabbert

BUILDING WITH CONCRETE: REPLACING ABSTRACT LANGUAGE WITH SENSORY DETAILS IN POETRY

In this generative, hour-long workshop, participants will work to transform concepts—such as anger, liberty, beauty, and greatness—into poems that feature tangible and sensory details. We will determine the texture, the smell, and the shape of these concepts in order to bring them to life on the page. After discussing one or more examples from poems written by contemporary poets, each participant will be invited to choose their own concept and to share ideas about the physical qualities they might assign to it. We will end the workshop by allowing time for participants to begin working on their own “concrete concept” poems and sharing some of the results. 

SUPPORT OUR WORK: Suggested donation of $5 or more. 

Every donation to Open Mouth Literary Center supports our programming, ASL interpreters, featured poets, and increasing accessibility. The only way we can keep doing this is with our community’s support!

You can help sustain this work by signing up to give regularly through our Patreon or make a one-time donation at our PayPal, Venmo (@omliterary), or CashApp ($openmouthliterary). 

If you are unable to donate at this time: Enter “$1.00” as the donation amount (Eventbrite won’t let you continue unless you type something other than zero) and click “check out.” The checkout page will appear where you can input contact information. If you scroll down to “Payment Method” there will be an option to click “pay at the door” and doing so will result in no charge upon registration.

Once you have filled out all required fields, you will be able to register for free.

ACCESS NOTES: The reading will take place virtually via Zoom with Zoom and Otter.ai auto captions. An ASL interpreter will be present. Access copies of poems will be made available via Google Docs. Our Access Statement will be read before we begin.

Recommended for attendees 16 years and above.

FEATURED POET:

Mag Gabbert is the author of the full-length collection SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS (Mad Creek Books, 2023), which was selected by Kathy Fagan as the winner of the 2021 Charles B. Wheeler Prize in Poetry; the chapbook The Breakup, which was selected by Kaveh Akbar as the winner of the 2022 Baltic Writing Residencies Chapbook Award; and the chapbook Minml Poems (Cooper Dillon Books, 2020). She’s the recipient of a 2021 Discovery Award from 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center as well as fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Idyllwild Arts, and Poetry at Round Top. Her work can be found in The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily, Copper Nickel, Guernica, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Mag has an MFA from UC Riverside and a PhD from Texas Tech. She lives in Dallas, Texas and teaches at Southern Methodist University. You can visit her website at maggabbert.com.