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Thank you to the editors of New Ohio Review and The National Poetry Review for sharing some recent work!

Read “My Daughter Asks if I Ever Had Trinkets”

listen to “No Most of the Time.”

The latest rendition of the Echo & Dance workshops starts FEBRUARY 2 and runs through FEBRUARY 23

Register here!

workshops & events

I believe the target audience of poetry is everybody. I believe we are all poets and know what poetry does. It makes us feel, as Emily Dickinson puts it, like “the top of my head were taken off.” I’ve not met a person who didn’t desire - no, need - to feel that sensation of awe in the face of vulnerability. Poetry can enrich our lives. That claim is simple. Poetry is our lives. That truth and acceptance changes how we live. In workshops and classes we gather and take inventory of, what Marianne Moore calls, “the garden of our imagination.” Whether you are looking to explore, to find readers, to find perspective, or simply - and most importantly - listen, all are welcome to join in the pleasure of the work. And the work is fun. If you’d like to reach out about workshop opportunities contact nicholas.reading@gmail.com.

ECHO & DANCE FEBRUARY 2021

TUESDAYS 2.2, 2.9, 2.16, 2.23 / INDIANA WRITERS CENTER 7-9:30PM

The Echo & Dance workshop for February is subtitled This Poem is No Joke. Of course, writing is quite serious work. And quite serious fun. Together we will look at poems that employ humor. By making us grin or laugh out loud, the joke disarms us. While we are chuckling, the poem’s message strikes us unaware. We will consider everything from word play to comedic conceits to one-liners. We will explore work ranging from Ogden Nash to Tony Hoagland, and participants are welcome to offer their own suggestions for our reading. We should remember, seriously, a few words from the poet Larry Levis:

And maybe he would be reminded that the body, too
is only a thing, a joke it kept trying to tell us
and now the moment for hearing it
is past.

Let us write our poems. Let us tell our jokes.

the prose poem

Monday 3.16.20 / Indiana Writers Center / 6:30-9:30

This workshop will focus not only on the prose poem as a form, but will also work to understand how our understanding of prose poems may open up possibilities in our fiction and creative nonfiction writing. We will examine the implications of Russell Edson's assertion that prose poems are, "A poetry freed from the definition of poetry, and a prose free of the necessities of fiction." What does this freedom on all fronts look like in poetry, prose, and in our own writing? Whether your life is poetry or prose or a little bit of both our time spent together should result in a better understanding of how language can present transformative opportunities for both the writer and the reader.

The everyday poem

SUNday 4.26.20 / Indiana Writers Center / 1-4

This workshop will focus on poems that use daily experiences as material. Whether it be an embrace with a partner in the morning, noticing a bee by the hydrangea, or whatever might have made us pause in our busy days, there is almost always something that we remember when we retire at night. Many poets, obviously, have used these everyday experiences as the subject for poems that have proved timeless. We will discuss examples of poems, generate our own material and writing, and ultimately examine how we might honor the mundane by crafting our language and engaging in discovery, layering of understanding of the subject. Our goal is simple: elevate ourselves through honest reflection in the hope of arriving at a truth organic.

There is hope in these poems but it is begrudgingly given. There seems to be that knowledge that despite ourselves we may yet find redemption. I believe Reading wants us to hope — just not to set our hopes too high.

— Michael Dennis

— Keith Montesano, author of Scoring the Silent Film and Housefire Elegies

In his second collection Love & Sundries, Nicholas Reading balances tragedy and empathy with both fear and wisdom in narrators who often yearn for what they don’t quite know how to achieve. Somewhere between the inner-voice of Mack from Cannery Row and the hard-bitten spirit of Richard Hugo, these poems tether themselves to hope amidst the elegiac emptiness of miles of flat land and peripheral characters who turn out to mean much more, where memories are finally forgotten to “create a future again and again and again tomorrow.”
READ MICHAEL DENNIS’ REVIEW OF LOVE & SUNDRIES IN TODAY’S BOOK OF POETRY

— From Donald Platt, author of Dirt Angels and Man Praying

In “Directive,” Robert Frost describes a guide “who only has at heart your getting lost.” Such a guide, it seems to me, is the poet Nicholas Reading. He observes whimsically: “On the bank of a river / a few people are lost. I expect that more // with join. No one will admit we did nothing / to prevent this gathering from happening.” So it is with his poems. They let us wander and get lost, but also gather and congregate. If a host of lost people find each other, the poet implies slyly, are they really lost? Another poem ends with Dirty Rosa saying, “You will not like it . . . but you are / welcome here.” Despite their edginess, and because of their edginess, Reading’s poems make us welcome. They say in capital letters, TRESPASS PLEASE.

W.H. AUDEN OFTEN WROTE ABOUT NOTHING AND EXPLAINED EVERYTHING WITH THE LAZY WHISK OF A HORSETAIL SWEEPING AT A SHORT-LIVED FLY. NICHOLAS READING DOES THE SAME DAMNED THING.

— MICHAEL DENNIS

writing

thanks to all the editors who shared these poems online

POEMS

THE CORTLAND REVIEW - TWO POEMS (audio)

Despite their edginess, and because of their edginess,

Reading’s poems make us welcome. They say in capital letters,

TRESPASS PLEASE.

- Donald Platt

LOSE MY NUMBER? got SOMETHING TO SAY? WANT TO BET I DON’T HAVE AN ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTION? TRY ME. IF MY ANSWERS LEAVE YOUR BELLY EMPTY I’LL BUY LUNCH. OR WRITE A POEM ABOUT LUNCH.

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