From courting to dating, romance has quickly shifted from “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” to “Swipe right” in the span of just a few hundred years! While Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura, and Sappho’s lush fragments are certainly timeless in their depictions of love and longing, where’s the poetry about ghosting, weird DMs, and perpetual first dates?
During this 2-hour Zoom workshop, we will use poetry to explore our attempts at dating in the 21st century. We will flash-back to the ancient love poetry of Shakespeare, Petrarch, and Sappho before voyaging into contemporary poetry by Nate Marshall, Alice Walker, Richard Siken, and Marge Piercy. Exercises will prompt reflection on situationships, pick-up lines, profiles, and the essay-length text confessionals we type out and delete. Bring all the screenshots, all the SuperSwipes, and all the missed connections to the Zoom room on Wednesday, January 11th, from 3-5pm.
REGISTER BY EMAILING ADAM@GLOUCESTERWRITERS.ORG
P.S.: We know writing, reading, and talking about dating can be triggering. If at any point during the workshop, you need to step away, feel free to turn off your camera and take a moment to yourself.
Led by Meghan Miraglia, poet and GWC Teaching Artist
Meghan Miraglia (she/her) is a poet, educator, editor, teaching artist, and student at Salem State University. Her prose poetry explores femininity, embodiment, apocalypse, mythology, mother/nature, and off-kilter saviors. Work/house, her chapbook printed in-house at Salem State, is a hybrid creative-research poetry collection exploring narratives of pauper inmates living in Irish workhouses during the Great Famine. Her work also appears in The Broadkill Review, Words & Whispers, Borrowed Solace, Red Skies, and the 2022 Intercollegiate Undergraduate Poetry Festival Chapbook. She will graduate in May of 2023 with a Bachelor’s degree in English and Secondary Education.