THE POETRY LAB PRESENTS4-week course with
Lorette C. Luzajic
Sunday, November 15 - December 6
1:00pm PT - 3:00pm PT
via Zoom
Carousel of Stories, 2023, by Lorette C. Luzajic 48x48", mixed media on gallery canvas
A painting can be the beginning of a poem.
A mysterious figure. An unexpected color. A small detail you can’t stop looking at. Visual art offers countless ways into a poem, inviting us to follow our curiosity and see where language takes us.
Ekphrastic poetry is poetry inspired by visual art, and its possibilities reach far beyond describing what we see. A poem might imagine what happened before the scene, borrow a painting’s atmosphere, investigate an artist’s story, or follow a personal association somewhere entirely unexpected.
Join Lorette C. Luzajic, founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review, for four weeks of looking closely and writing adventurously. Through art, poetry, discussion, and guided exercises, you’ll explore the history of ekphrasis, experiment with different approaches, and strengthen the craft that brings your poems alive.
Carousel of Stories, 2023, by Lorette C. Luzajic 48x48", mixed media on gallery canvas
What You’ll Explore
New ways into a poem. Use free association, research, and art history to move from looking to writing.
The craft behind the inspiration. Experiment with imagery, metaphor, sound, syntax, and narrative.
Possibilities beyond description. Explore how a poem can respond to an artwork’s story, mood, and unanswered questions.
Beginnings and endings that hold their weight. Develop titles, opening lines, and endings that give your poems impact.
What You’ll Take With You
By the end of the course, you’ll have:
A foundation in the history of ekphrasis and its changing possibilities.
New ways to look at art and turn your observations into poetry.
Four to eight or more new poems inspired by visual art.
Practice using poetic elements to deepen your writing.
Strategies for creating stronger titles, beginnings, and endings.
Poetry Inspired by Visual Art
4-week course with Lorette C. Luzajic
November 15 - December 6
1pm PT - 3pm PT
via Zoom
One fully funded BIPOC Scholarship is available for this course.
Class begins Sunday, November 15
and continues November 22, November 29, and December 6
All sessions are live via Zoom from 1:00pm 3:00pm PT
All Classes will be recorded!
What’s it like in class? This is not a passive Zoom seminar or a pre-recorded lecture. Our classes are live, interactive, and community-centered, with a real instructor and real writers gathering together each week to create, discuss, and explore poetry in real time.
Students are encouraged to ask questions, participate in discussion, share work, and engage with the material at whatever level feels comfortable to them. The atmosphere is supportive, thoughtful, and creatively energized. You do not need to have all the answers before arriving. You just need curiosity, openness, and a willingness to write.
Lorette C. Luzajic is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review, the flagship journal of ekphrastic literature.
Her ekphrastic poetry and flash fiction has been published in hundreds of journals and a dozen anthologies, widely nominated, taught in workshops from Tennessee to Egypt, translated into Urdu, Spanish, and Arabic, and twice honoured in Best Small Fictions anthologies. Her latest collection, Disgust (Cyberwit Books) compiles 72 ekphrastic short stories on illness. She has taught dozens of courses and workshops on ekphrastic writing through The Ekphrastic Academy, Women on Writing, and beyond, and is a frequent guest speaker by zoom on ekphrasis, recently at John Hopkins University, the London Arts Based Research Centre, and more. Her long running art and food lore column at Good Food Revolution was nominated seven times for Best American Food Writing. She frequently writes essays on visual art in addition to poetry and fiction. Lorette is a lifelong student of art history and visual art and it fuels her writing and teaching as well as her own art practice. Her award-winning mixed media collage paintings have been collected in forty countries so far.
Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca.
Follow Your Eye. Find Your Next Poem.
Spend four weeks exploring what happens when visual art meets your imagination, and build a writing practice you can return to whenever you need a fresh beginning.
Why Become a Member?
Your course enrollment gives you four weeks of creative momentum. Membership helps you sustain it.
When you become a Lab Partner Member alongside your course registration, you also unlock automatic access to The BrainTrust, our monthly live generative writing workshop built to keep your creative practice active year-round. Each BrainTrust session is a standalone creative experience centered on a unique craft theme, poetic technique, or experimental prompt structure designed to help writers generate fresh work in an energized, low-pressure environment.
In other words: the course gives you depth. Membership gives you continuity.
Many students leave a class energized and inspired, only to struggle maintaining momentum afterward. The BrainTrust helps bridge that gap by giving you a consistent creative space to return to each month alongside a community of serious, curious writers who are actively making new work too.
If you’re already investing in your writing practice through a course, membership helps turn that momentum into an ongoing creative rhythm instead of a one-time experience.
Plus! As a Member, you’ll save 10% off every course and 15% off of The Feedback Circle!
Membership is month-to-month with no long-term commitment, and you can cancel anytime directly through your account settings.
Lab Partners is The Poetry Lab’s membership program for writers who want to stay connected to a consistent creative practice throughout the year. More than a discount program, Lab Partners is designed to support the long arc of a writing life through accessible workshops, deeper educational opportunities, and an ongoing sense of community.
As a Lab Partner, you’ll receive:
Free enrollment in our monthly BrainTrust generative workshops
Reduced enrollment rates across many of our courses and programs (Enroll as a Member!)
Significant savings on premium offerings like the Feedback Circle
Access to exclusive member communications, opportunities, and announcements
A direct way to stay engaged with The Poetry Lab’s evolving educational ecosystem year-round
Lab Partners is ideal for writers who know they want to keep showing up to the page, whether through monthly workshops, multi-week courses, critique spaces, or independent creative practice.
Membership also directly supports our mission to keep poetry education accessible through sliding-scale programming, financial aid opportunities, and sustainable compensation for teaching artists. There’s no minimum committment. You can cancel anytime.
This is not just a membership. A writing life. 🌿