LBI Poet's Studio

About this event

Accomplished and emerging poets alike can find inspiration in our Zoom workshop. To attend this virtual event contact Sue Cummings via email scummings817@comcast.net to receive the Zoom link.

This group meets the 1st Thursday of every month from 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm. You may either join the Zoom event at the LBI Library in the meeting room using our laptops, or you can join from home using your own computer/laptop.

Our Prompt for November is to write a poem that uses a word, a phrase, or line from 2026 Noble Laureate, Anne Carson's poem, Between Us And.

FYI: Canadian Anne Carson, the 2026 Nobel Laureate in Literature, is an avant-garde classist/poet/ and essayist. Her work communicates that human experience is defined by the spaces between ... words, lovers, and the ancient past and the present.

Carson feels herself to be a visual, not verbal, artist: “I didn’t write very much at all until I guess my twenties because I drew. I just drew pictures, and sometimes wrote on them when I was young, but mostly I was interested in drawing. I never did think of myself as a writer!”

Carson’s public persona is famously austere, intellectual, and intensely private.

When news of her Nobel Prize broke, she was characteristically remote, found in Iceland “listening to the wind”. Her performance pieces and readings often feature "deadpan delivery, long silences, or collaborations that deliberately decentering her own authorial voice. If there is a central lesson Carson wants to leave with her audiences, it is the beauty of the fragment. Carson urges her listeners not to fear silence, loss, or incomplete understandings."

Carson wants us to look for truth in the cracks of broken things, and suggests "we are most alive when we are actively reaching across the unbridgeable distances between ourselves and others."

Between Us And

by Anne Carson

BETWEEN US AND

animals is a namelessness.

We    flail    around

generically      —

camelopardalis   is   what

the Romans came up with

for  "giraffe" ( it looked to

them like a camel crossed

with a leopard ) or get the

category wrong — a musk

ox isn't an ox at all but

more closely cognate with

the  goat —  and   when

choosing   to    name

individual  animals  we

pretend they are objects

(Spot) or virtues (Beauty)

or just other selves (Bob).

As a Bonus Challenge use three or more words chosen at random from the novel The Director, by Daniel Kehlmann.

outside, Sunday, car, memory, pearls, scrawny, breakfast, half-past, black, compartment, shoulder, corridor, scrawled, mirror, quivering, beard, sockets, sagging, television, hissing, blows, knees, numb, presenter, exile, round, slept, Dracula, lawn, trays, movies, boots, emigrant, maestro, eighteen, shouting, wheels, estate, halt, perish, Vermont, Buddhism, dizzy, butts, thirty-five, bullets, tower, rattled, dialect, stone, gnarled, nursery, stag's head, ladder, handheld, cardboard, bitten, ambush, cheerful, capable, Shakespeare, telephone, coffee, penance, white, hammering, conjecture