Abracadabra! The Poem as Prayer and Conjuring—Workshop with Poet Natasha Oladokun

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The Driftless Writing Center is delighted to host an in-person workshop led by lauded poet Natasha Oladokun, the inaugural First Wave Poetry fellow at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her workshop—titled “Abracadabra! The Poem as Prayer and Conjuring”—will be held at the Vernon County Historical Society Museum in Viroqua, Wisconsin, on September 23, 2023.

About Natasha Oladokun’s workshop:

W.H. Auden once wrote in a poem, “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its saying….” But what if this is only half the story? Images and lines, meter and music—these craft elements are essential to the making of a poem. And yet, poems and lyric are more than their individual parts. Poems are acts and invocations. They’re expressions of desire, or confessions of fear or ecstasy, and they’re a powerful way of naming and bringing something imagined yet unrealized into existence. In poems, you build the world. It’s what you do as a writer: abracadabra, create as you speak.

In this workshop we’ll read and talk about work by poets who invite the spiritual and metaphysical into the world of their poems—poets who wield language, story, and lyric as deftly as a wand. We’ll look at poems that pray and poems that argue, poems that don’t shy away from naming what they want. And we’ll spend some time writing our own poems together, too. No prior experience is required for this workshop—all that’s needed is a sense of fun, curiosity, and a little bit of faith in the magic of language.

About Natasha Oladokun:

Natasha Oladokun is a Black, queer poet and essayist from Virginia. She holds fellowships from Cave Canem, The National Endowment for the Arts, the Jackson Center for Creative Writing, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the inaugural First Wave Poetry fellow. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Academy of American Poets, Kenyon Review Online, Harper’s Bazaar, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and is working on her first collection of poems.