You are cordially invited to my FREE workshop at Poetry Palooza, Sat, April 20 from 10am-11:30am in which we will create surprise in our poems by welcoming in the UGLY. Why spend time thinking about ugliness in such an ugly time as this? As poets, shouldn’t we be invoking beauty? “Beauty is detachment, the absence of passion. Ugliness, by contrast, is passion,” Umberto Eco said. Neuroscientists agree. Compared to Beautiful poems*, Ugly poems release dopamine in both the reader AND the writer, eliciting an operatic melee of contradiction, ambivalence, and surprise.

Ugly images, words, sounds, and forms affect our behavior differently than beautiful ones. When we turn from an Ugly image, our right inferior frontal gyrus (RIFG) kicks in (as it always does in aesthetic appraisals), which causes US to adjust OUR moods and refocus. So ugly makes us rethink and adjust our responses to stimuli. Technically, that's a superhero power.

This workshop is for poets at any level who want to expand the landscape of their work. Using masterfully ugly poems as examples, we’ll read, discuss, write, and surprise ourselves. We'll talk about what "ugly" really is to our brains, and how we can harness its power, no matter how we write or what we write about.

Many words our brains associate with “ugly” aren’t.