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OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | In this masterclass, we will look at several poems that speak to the powerful insights of poetry towards consciousness and inner experience. By exploring modern poetry’s assertion of individuality in mass society, we will come to see its paradoxical universality. In this self-reflection, we will explore whether poets are able to resist self-seeking materialist ideals. In our troubled world, the irrelevance of poetry in mainstream culture has coincided with a loss of something important about being human, and being of nature.  Poetry is a form for  metaphysical questioning, and through music, fragmented narratives, and dreamscapes, poetry returns us again and again to our shared humanity, our yearning for meaning even as we make it. This class will be a talk and a discussion for both writers and readers of poetry’s emancipatory possibilities. We will read poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Louise Glück, Yusef Komunyakaa and others, concluding with a 7 minute writing prompt and some time to share.

Bianca Stone is the author of the poetry collections What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022), which won the Vermont Book Award in Poetry; The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018); Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Octopus Books, 2014); and the forthcoming The Near and Distant World (Tin House, 2026). She collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated version of Antigonick, Carson’s translation of Antigone (New Directions, 2012) and also published a book of hybrid poetry comics, Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours, in Pleiades Press’s Visual Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Nation. She teaches classes at the poetry-based nonprofit Ruth Stone House in Goshen, Vermont, where she is editor-at-large for ITERANT magazine and host of the Ode & Psyche Podcast. She is currently serving as Vermont's poet laureate.