92Y Readings & Writing Workshops: Olympia Dukakis stars in Eudora Welty’s Asphodel

The subsidiary showed up late

And tired.  Her head kept falling

Out of its orbit and into

The ventilation queue.  When the

Astronaut stopped to take off

His make-up, he presented her

With a décolletage of primrose

Petals on a cracked vitrine.

They entwined themselves on the lattice

Only to recoil a bit when an erratic

Dilettante usurped their handholds.

With an adroit maneuver, they

Sandwiched the euphemism between

His anxiety and her euphoria.

The cordial they squeezed from

Their union induced lightheadedness.

They cut out the obit, pasted it

On the last page, then folded the page

In half, folded the corners into triangles

And flicked it across the kitchen table.

Love poetry? Ready to write it? Here’s the workshop for you, which’ll get you generating beautiful words both in and out of the classroom. Look to your classmates and to your poetic forebears for inspiration, as you hone your personal writerly voice.

Sally Van Doren is the author of Possessive and Sex at Noon Taxes, which received the Walt Whitman Award.

LIMITED AVAILABILITY
Starts Wed, Feb 18, 6:30-9 pm, 8 sessions

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, his first novel since the bestselling Never Let Me Go, tells a luminous story about the act of forgetting and the power of memory. “He is one of the finest prose stylists of our time,” writes Michael Ondaatje.

Since his first book, “Caryl Phillips has been trying, with unusual seriousness and concentration, to rewrite English literature by filling in the gaps, the black holes, in the country’s official story of itself,” writes Pico Iyer. The Lost Child, Phillips’ new novel, is a tale of orphans and outcasts, inspired by Wuthering Heights.

Wed, Mar 18, 7 pm

Wed, Mar 11, 8 pm