True Lit: Exploring the Mysteries of Self Through Metaphor

Join Poet Laureate Suzanne Underwood Rhodes for a poetry workshop.

The natural world offers a rich and seemingly infinite source of creatures and plants, skies and seas, geological features, and weather that are available to artists of every sort to interpret imaginatively. For poets, metaphor is the medium by which a poem can discover, objectify, and turn outward the most inward parts of our being so that the personal becomes the universal.

In this workshop, Suzanne Underwood Rhodes will discuss how representations from nature correspond with aspects of the innermost self where desire, fears, hope, sadness, regrets, and all the other emotions and impulses reside. To illustrate the concept, Suzanne will share several poems, some of her own and some from notables like Li- Young Lee, Mary Oliver, Barbara Crooker, and Phillip Howerton. To further fire the imagination, participants will do a short writing exercise, then compose a poem where nature meets memory, the treasury of the inward self.

About Suzanne:

Suzanne Underwood Rhodes is the poet laureate of Arkansas, appointed in January 2022 by the governor for a four-year term. She’s the author of Flying Yellow: New and Selected Poems, named a semi-finalist in the 2022 North American Book Award of the Poetry Society of Virginia. Other books are What a Light Thing, This Stone; two chapbooks, Hungry Foxes and Weather of the House, and two books of lyrical prose, A Welcome Shore and Sketches of Home. Her poems have appeared in many journals, books, and anthologies, with recent work in Mid/South Anthology, Slant, Green Mountains Review, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Medicine and Meaning, and Christian Century. She has a new chapbook completed and is working on a third full-length poetry collection. Awards include nominations for the Pushcart prize, first place in the Dr. Lily Peter Memorial Award, first place in the Richard Lewis Haiku contest, first place in the Virginia Highlands Creative Writing Contest, and others. A retired college instructor, she lives in Fayetteville and teaches virtual poetry workshops through the Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, Virginia.