Rooted Words: Place, Landscape, and Setting in Contemporary Poetry with Sabina Khan-Ibarra

FRIDAYS, Nov. 7th - 21st | Where do your poems live? In this three-week generative poetry workshop, we’ll explore how place functions as more than backdrop; how setting becomes character, metaphor, memory, and resistance. From childhood bedrooms to ancestral terrain, from city streets to imagined landscapes, we’ll examine how poets across cultures use setting to deepen emotional resonance, build narrative, and anchor the abstract in the tangible. Each session includes close readings of poems, guided craft discussions, and prompts that encourage exploration of your own emotional and geographic landscapes.

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By the end of this course, participants will:

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• Analyze how setting functions in poetry
• Generate at least four new poems centered around place and landscape
• Experiment with different approaches to place: literal, metaphorical, inherited, and reimagined
• Revise work using craft elements like perspective, detail layering, and form to reflect transformation and emotional arc
• Develop tools to write setting-driven poetry that connects the personal to the political, the local to the mythic

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