Take a text. Cross out everything that no longer serves you. What remains is yours. This is erasure poetry, a practice of reclamation that treats inherited language not as fixed truth but as living material, as impermanent as we are.
Impermanence is a basic tenet of Buddhism: Life is change. If something is alive, it is ever changing, ever being changed. What better material, then, to erase?---than the texts we call sacred, the living words that have shaped culture deeply and that most deserve to grow alongside us?
In this workshop, we will work directly with passages from sacred texts, using watercolor paints and erasure to unbury the silent wisdoms beneath doctrine. We'll discover that a single passage can hold many poems, and that the act of finding them is itself transformation.
No prior poetry experience needed. Texts and supplies will be provided by Howell and our partners at the Frist.
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Rebecca Gayle Howell is a poet writing new myths for climate change. Her genre-bending work merges verse, fiction, libretti, visual art, and translation, receiving critical acclaim from outlets like Publisher’s Weekly,Poetry London (U.K.), Limelight (AUS), The Kenyon Review, Gramophone (U.K.), Ms. magazine, Southern Review of Books, Asymptote (INTL), Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers,MINT (IND), Classic FM (U.K.), and The Los Angeles Times. Howell’s awards include two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Pushcart Prize, and the Carson McCullers Fellowship. For a decade she served as the Poetry Editor for the Oxford American, the second in the magazine’s history. In 2019, Howell became the first Kentucky writer to be named a United States Artists Fellow. In 2025, she received the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. Her latest book is Erase Genesis, just out from Project Poëtica / Bridwell Press.
Rebecca is part of our Fall 2026 Visiting Writers Series. Welcome!
