Empathy: an exploration of the other through poetry

Welcome to the ninth class of the Versopolis Traineeship, a series dedicated to expanding the horizons of poetic and literary practice. This session – Empathy: an exploration of the other through poetry – features poet, teacher and thinker Elisa Biagini, who invites us to rethink empathy not as sentiment, but as a rigorous artistic method and ethical stance.

What does it mean to write with the Other rather than about the Other? How do poems resist the market’s demand for a single, brandable ‘I’ and instead open to a chorus of selves – human and more-than-human? In a lecture that is both practical and political, Biagini examines how neoliberal habits, genre conventions and familiar craft moves can domesticate our voices, flatten difference, and turn the world into extractive ‘material.’ She proposes an alternate practice: attention as reciprocity, form as relation, and empathy as a making that refuses possession.

Drawing on close readings of selected poems and her own studio pedagogy, Biagini guides participants through strategies for decentering the lyric ego, diversifying perception and engaging responsibly with alterity – animals, landscapes, ecosystems, communities and the many selves within one body. You’ll explore how the poem’s choices (syntax, line, white space, point of view, sensory hierarchy) can counter habits of domination and open new pathways for invention.

This class is especially valuable for poets and writers who feel stretched between their ethical intuitions and the pressures of visibility, productivity and self-branding. Biagini argues that authors are not marketers of a fixed identity but makers of relations – and that nurturing a sustainable practice means protecting your creative agency from reduction while cultivating genuine encounter.

Alongside the lecture, you’ll receive guiding questions and assignments designed to move from concept to practice:

1) My Other Self

Work from a personal photograph or vivid memory to meet the second self that lives beside you. Shift voice, rhythm, or syntax; let contradiction speak. Resist domestication and let form register the encounter.

2) The Other (Animal/Human)

Write toward an interspecies relation. Experiment with self-erasure, unsettle labels like ‘difference,’ and reorder the senses (smell before sight, touch before sound). Ask what reciprocity might look like on the page.

3) Eyes of an Animal

Rebuild perception through a chosen creature’s sensorium. Let line breaks, spacing, and image follow echo, tremor, migration, or scent. Research lightly; listen more.

4) Body in a Landscape

Enter a natural environment you love. Attend longer than is comfortable. Compose a poem in which place co-authors meaning; let your speaking ‘I’ be permeable to weather, scale and time.

By the end of the session, you’ll have a small portfolio of draft poems, concrete tools for ethical research and form, and a clearer sense of how to keep your practice free from the reductions of capitalism and neoliberalism. Most importantly, you’ll leave with a working definition of empathy as craft: a disciplined way of making that restores relation, complexity and care to the poem.

Further Reading:

Mary Oliver: American Primitive (poems)
Intimate, attentive lyrics that model empathy through close observation of animals and landscapes.

Paul Celan: Selected Poems and Prose
Radical, ethically charged poetics of address, silence, and relation after catastrophe.

Donna Haraway: The Companion Species Manifesto
On interspecies kinship and co-making – vital for thinking beyond human-centered authorship.

Byung-Chul Han: The Burnout Society
A sharp critique of neoliberal self-exploitation and the ‘achievement subject’ – context for resisting domestication of the lyric ‘I.’

Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Cultural theory on how market logics shape imagination; useful for reframing poetic agency.

Julia Kristeva: The Kristeva Reader (ed. Toril Moi)
Semanalysis, abjection, and subjectivity – tools for writing the self as plural and permeable.

Emily Dickinson resources – poems, manuscripts and scholarship: https://www.emilydickinson.org/
A master of inwardness and attention; rich for studying voice, perception and the ethics of address.