The Ugliest Body, the Most Beautiful Body
A Workshop on Worshiping the Form
With Keetje Kuipers
The scarred body. The fat body. The body that has been touched and remade by illness or accident. The forgotten, maligned, or deviant body. The hungry body. The hidden body and the performed body. The body aged or transformed by pregnancy and childbirth. The body chosen.
If desire is predicated on what we are taught to value, then what do the bodies we have and the bodies we hold say about what is most important to us? How do we do the work of loving a body outside of contemporary Western culture’s normed aesthetic frames? And, most importantly, how do we find the words to worship what we love?
As part of her work to bring greater humility and self-awareness to our engagement with poetry, Keetje Kuipers will offer close readings of poems that interrogate notions of beauty and that discover ways of admiring and honoring the body in all its varied forms. Using generative prompts and specific craft tools, participants will create their own poems that give voice to the love we feel—or the love we dream of—for our own bodies and for the bodies that surround us. During this two-hour workshop, participants can expect to begin several new poems and, ultimately, walk away with a new vision for how to write the physical form with compassion and forgiveness.
This session will be recorded; the recording will be available to participants until December 5, 2025. Participants will be part of a Zoom Meeting with Keetje Kuipers, which means everyone will have the option to turn cameras on (although that is not required to participate). By joining the class, participants consent to being recorded (only if they opt to turn their camera on). As noted above, the recording will be available to class participants only for a limited time; the recording will not be shared for any other purpose.
While this class is designed as a participatory workshop, it can be purchased to be viewed asynchronously (not live) for a similar experience.
DETAILS
The Ugliest Body, the Most Beautiful Body
A Workshop on Worshiping the Form
(A Zoom class to attend in person or watch later)
Dates
Sunday, October 5th
Time
1:00-2:30 PM EST
Cost
$90 USD
“Kuipers crafts a meditation on the blurred boundaries between our bodies and the natural world, suggesting the ways in which bodies become earth, while earth forms a body of its own… Love of self and love of the earth are deeply imbricated with love for another, Kuipers suggests, all united by a careful attention to the realities of embodiment. It is, in part, this focus on embodiment that brings us some of the most moving and striking poetry in the collection. In her consideration of what it means to raise one child while still desiring another child, Kuipers makes a stunning contribution to writing on motherhood. Here she asks: how are children our legacy—and how can we leave other kinds of legacy in lieu of children?”
—
LA Review of Books
Keetje Kuipers
Keetje Kuipers is the author of four books of poetry from BOA Editions, and the Editor-in-Chief of Poetry Northwest. Her collection Lonely Women Make Good Lovers is the winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and was called “elegant, earthy, [and] pertinent,” by Marilyn Hacker. Her first book, Beautiful in the Mouth, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Her subsequent books, The Keys to the Jail and All Its Charms, include poems honored with publication in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies.
Keetje’s poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, POETRY, American Poetry Review, and over a hundred other publications. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a Bread Loaf Fellow, the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, a former board member and Vice President of the National Book Critics Circle, and is the recipient of a 2025 NEA fellowship. She lives in Montana with her wife and children.