A Generative Poetry Workshop with Satya Dash
About the Workshop
What happens when the familiar world tilts—just slightly—and begins to glow?
In The Joy of Defamiliarization, we will explore strangeness not as ornament, but as strategy. Drawing on Viktor Shklovsky’s foundational idea that art exists to make the stone stony again, this generative workshop asks: how can we restore shock, texture, and immediacy to lived experience through the poem?
Together, we will read and closely examine poems by Matthew Olzmann, Natalie Shapero, Armen Davoudian and Robert Hass, among others—writers who bend perception, destabilize logic, and refresh the ordinary through tonal shifts, imaginative leaps, rhetorical play, and emotional intelligence.
Our focus will not be admiration alone. We will dissect the mechanics of strangeness as :
– A tool for emotional intensification
– A method of re-seeing lived observation
– A way of resisting cliché in language and thought
– A doorway to discovering one’s authentic voice
The workshop will also step briefly into cinema. By looking at selection of images from contemporary films, we will examine how framing, silence, jump cuts, and shifts in scale can inform poetic structure and readerly experience. What can the camera teach the line break? What can montage teach metaphor?
Strangeness is not obscurity. It is attention sharpened until the world becomes newly possible. The session will include:
– Close reading and craft analysis
– Discussion of technique
– Generative prompts drawn from our shared texts
– Writing time along with some voluntary sharing and reflection
About the Facilitator
Satya Dash is a recipient of the Vijay Nambisan Poetry Fellowship and the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize. His poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Ninth Letter, Poetry Wales, Prairie Schooner, and Cincinnati Review, among others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator. He has been nominated on multiple occasions for Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. He grew up in Cuttack and now lives in Bangalore.
Details of the workshop
Date: April 25, 2026 – Batch 1 April 26, 2026 – Batch 2
Time: 10 AM — 1 PM
Fees: 2500
Platform: Zoom