Visitations: Stanley Kunitz’s Strange Guests

A poem-generating workshop inspired by the poetry of Stanley Kunitz.

J.D. Scrimgeour

Examining Stanley Kunitz’s “The Darned Man” and “The Wellfleet Whale,” and other poems, J.D. Scrimgeour will explore the idea of “visitation” in poetry and will help participants write their own poems of visitations. Why does one get visited? How does that visit alter a household or landscape? How might that visit connect us to history, personal and communal? Discussion will focus on both uninvited and surprising visits to generate poems about unforeseen arrivals of those lost, longed-for, and unexpected.