If you have ever thought poetry is “difficult” or “hard” in some way you couldn’t quite place, the Midwest Writing Center has just the thing: a reading and writing workshop focused on identifying, reading through, and working with different kinds of “difficulty” in a four-week workshop series facilitated by poet and MWC Executive Director Ryan Collins.  

The workshop will ground itself in the essay “On Difficulty in Poetry” by the seminal American poet Reginald Shepherd (1963-2008), which breaks difficulty in poetry down into several categories (lexical, allusive, syntactical, semantic, formal, modal). Each week, we will look at 1-2 of these categories of difficulty, while reading poems that demonstrate them. We will discuss the Shepherd essay, the sample poems, and try writing our own work using the understandings we arrive at via our readings, discussions, and experience.