Using Abstract Nouns
When: Thursday, October 3, 2024
12:00–1:30 PM Eastern / 9:00–10:30 AM Pacific
Cost: $29
“Poets … can do whatever they want as long as they do it well,” responded Elizabeth Alexander when asked, in a 2012 Big Think interview, “Have poets done themselves a disservice by writing too abstractly?”
While the questioner was likely referring to a poem’s indirect and subtextual ways of making meaning, Alexander’s perspective applies, as well, to the most obvious culprit of conceptual writing: abstract nouns.
How do we use these words well—words that refer to an idea, a feeling, a state; to the intangible; to things we can’t see, hear, taste, touch, smell—in a body of words typically designed to deliver a direct perception or experience to the reader?
Examining a handful of well-made poems, we’ll identify several textual contexts in which an abstract noun acquires poetic value—via materiality or concreteness—and we’ll apply the learnings to one of our abstraction-laden poems.