"The words of other schools of poetry are like colored paintings; my disciples paint with black ink," the Japanese haiku master Matsuo Bashō once said. The discipline of haiku is to reign in what we might otherwise call poetic language, an aesthetic known as wabi sabi.

In contrast, The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by excesses of romanticism. 

In this workshop, we'll transform the lushness of the Hudson River School paintings into the "black ink" of haiku. We'll close-read well-known haiku masters, from Bashō to Issa to Jack Kerouac, and feast our eyes on some of the great Hudson River School paintings by Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, and a coterie of their lesser-known female contemporaries.

After writing our haiku, we'll literally "paint them in black ink" on a large sheet of paper to take home.

$30 / Includes mid-day break & refreshments
Limited to 8

Schedule

12:00-1:30: Introductions, readings, discussion
1:30-3:00:  Lunch & free writing time
3:00-5:00: Workshop/Production

Teaching artist: Lissa Kiernan