POETRY: The Mask You Wear & the Mask You Become

POETRY
The Mask You Wear & the Mask You Become
with Anthony Thomas Lombardi
Tuesdays, 7-9 pm EST | Starting June 11
 
6 weeks, on zoom
Registration includes the full Writer's Regimen
 
While confessional poetry has trained us to read the voices of poems as the voices of the poets that wrote them, the reality is often much more varied and complex. When our subconsciouses begin to steer the ship, they tap different sides of our psyches and identities—both the ones we craft and the ones we bury—to navigate the fog sprawled before us. The whole is always more than the sum of its parts. The same way poets and their tools evolve, so do the slippery and evasive sirens singing our ships to wreck. Enter the persona poem. Contrary to what this term may suggest, the persona poem is where the poet removes one mask to become another. They emerge of necessity when, paradoxically, we need to remove ourselves from a poem, a character, a voice, to fully see our reflection through the eyes of who we are most arrested by, disarmed by, tortured by. As Jane Hirschfield notes, “This is one paradox of originality: the willingness to become transparent, to offer oneself to the Other, whether in the world of things or of art, leads toward rather than away from individuality of expression.” We will follow this concept wherever it may take us—to its eventual conclusion, a rock covered in splintered wood, or stranded on a new patch of sand—through the eyes of the Other. Together we will read and discuss works by Hirshfield, Hanif Abdurraqib, Sara Borjas, Louise Glück, James Tate, Randall Jarrell, Margaret Atwood, John Darnille, Patricia Smith, Kazim Ali, Jamila Woods, Lucille Clifton, Jeanann Verlee, Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis, and more or maybe less—depending on where our energy takes us, we’ll follow.
 
Anthony Thomas Lombardi is the author of Murmurations (YesYes Books, 2025), a Poetry Project 2021-2022 Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow, and a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, among other accolades. He has taught or continues to teach with Borough of Manhattan Community College, Paris College of Art, Brooklyn Poets, Polyphony Lit’s apprenticeship programming, community programming throughout New York City, and currently serves as a poetry editor for Sundog Lit. His work has appeared or will soon in Best New Poets, Guernica, BlackWarrior Review, Nashville Review, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with his cat, Dilla.
 
For more information, visit https://www.southeastreview.org/writers-regimen