Our Workshops

Writer as Reader Workshops

A recent critic described T.S. Eliot as an usher in hell gesturing readers to their places; perhaps this enforces Eliot’s agenda of “making the unpoetical poetical.” Perhaps his characters – Prufrock, Madame Sosostris, Tiresies – are less ushers than guides, similar to the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, an analogy drawn by Ann Lauterbach in her poem “Alice in the Waste Land.” In this workshop, we will read Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and “Alice in the Waste Land” as experiments in dramatic mono- and dia-logue. We’ll model kinetic and collaborative activities that can further students’ understanding of the poetry’s themes and images and serve as preliminaries for analytic writing. The writing we do here will serve as a starting point for discussions of voice, both critical and reflective.

Texts: The hypertext version of "The Wasteland," http://eliotswasteland.tripod.com/ and bring any complete and legible copy of the poem to the workshop; Or to Begin Again, Ann Lauterbach (Penguin 2009).