Acclaimed poet Phillis Levin will give a poetry workshop entitled The Second Person, open to writers and readers, on April 27 at 12 PM at the Cornwall Library. This complements her reading the previous evening from her latest poetry collection, An Anthology of Rain.

Enrollment is limited to 12 students, and registration on the event website is required. Writers and readers are welcome. There is a materials fee of $25 (scholarships are available).

In this workshop students will explore the power of direct address in poetry. The act of speaking to (rather than of or about) a person, a thing, a place, or an idea opens us to a real or imagined Other—and to a new engagement with language. Unfamiliar elements within oneself are called forth and previously untapped possibilities of diction, tone, and style emerge in the writing process.

Workshop members will receive a packet of contemporary poems that exemplify ways of deploying direct address. Through in-class exercises, you will experiment with (and experience) the vital charge of this ancient rhetorical strategy. Feel free to bring a poem you have already composed, especially one that’s ready to be transformed.

Levin’s poems have been published in AGNI, The Atlantic, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Criterion, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Plume, Poetry, Poetry London, Raritan, The Common, The Yale Review and elsewhere.

She previously taught creative writing at The University of Maryland, NYU, and the 92nd Street Y, and is now Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English emerita at Hofstra.

Phillis Levin lives with her husband in New York City and West Cornwall, Connecticut.