THIS AUGUST: I’ll be teaching a course on mythopoesis at Robert Frost’s farm in Derry, NH. The Frost Farm Conference is one of the best poetry conferences in the game, and there’ll be many great people there besides myself worth meeting and learning from. Course description below:

In the ancient world, the role of the poet was conceived much like the role of the shaman, prophet, or mystic: to receive visions from the beyond and transmute them into stories which could guide the spiritual direction of the people. This tribal role of myth-maker has been remarkably preserved even as society has changed dramatically. Poets like Chaucer and Dante, Spenser and Milton, Blake and Shelley, Yeats and Eliot, have continued in generation after generation to conjure up new mythologies to reveal the human soul to itself. 

Only in our own day do poets seem to shirk the responsibility of myth-making, content to confine themselves to an impoverished, quotidian sense of reality even as our need for guiding myths grows more dire than ever. In this course, we will reignite the ancient poetic nerve, investigating how poets in English have fulfilled the role of myth-maker in past ages, and thinking about how to bring our own fantastical inner visions, our own psychocosmos, into the poetry (and yes, even lyric poetry!) of the 21st century.