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 K. Iver." 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 K. Iver, white nonbinary trans, visible from the knees up. They have a closed mouth and are making direct eye contact with the camera. They are sitting on a brown couch with their forearms resting on their knees and their hands hanging down. They are wearing a black blazer and a black and white striped shirt buttoned to the collar. They have short brown hair and blue eyes. Photo by Brooke Opie.

Elegy and Ecstasy: A Workshop on Desire and Contrast with K. Iver

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 K. Iver." 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 K. Iver, white nonbinary trans, visible from the knees up. They have a closed mouth and are making direct eye contact with the camera. They are sitting on a brown couch with their forearms resting on their knees and their hands hanging down. They are wearing a black blazer and a black and white striped shirt buttoned to the collar. They have short brown hair and blue eyes. Photo by Brooke Opie.

Join us on Sunday, March 5, 2023 at 2:00pm Central for a generative workshop with featured poet K. Iver.

Register Here

Elegy and Ecstacy: A Workshop on Desire and Contrast

Lately I’ve been interested in how queer poets write desire, which is not to be confused with writing sex. Queer poets can uniquely show us how to explore the erotic, pleasure, discomfort, and want, partly because the onset of queer desire is often laced with the forbidden and shame–which adds to desire’s intensity. Poems by Richie Hoffman, David Wojnarowicz, CA Conrad, Danez Smith, Meg Day, and Richard Siken embrace that intensity and can give us all permission to write toward the tension of seeming opposites: joy and grief, desire and dread, movement and stasis, etc. In practicing the craft of building contrast, participants can discover richly varying tones and moods between both spaces, how they can stack, and how they can unfold.

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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:

K. Iver is a nonbinary trans poet born in Mississippi. Their book Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco won the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry from Milkweed Editions. Their poems have appeared in Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, The Adroit, and elsewhere. Iver is the 2021-2022 Ronald Wallace Fellow for Poetry at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. They have a Ph.D. in Poetry from Florida State University. For more, visit kleeiver.com.

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