The ode, commonly understood as a ceremonious and celebratory form, an homage or tribute to a subject of the poet’s choosing, is also an exercise in retrieval. As we inhabit islands—a world—of unrelenting crises, engaging in the act of rescuing the disregarded and seemingly ordinary can be a defiant move against the manufactured precarity that insists on consuming us whole. In this workshop, we will explore how the ode as a contemporary form can function as a tactic to salvage all that which slips through the cracks, “buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives,” as the poet Adrienne Rich would put it. And how through this unearthing, odes can help us recover what is oftentimes forcefully wrung from our selves—our memory, our joy, our hope.
