Poetry Writing Workshop

This is a graduate level poetry writing workshop
offered within the Creative Writing MFA program.
Primarily aimed at students in the graduate
writing program, it may also be open-if space
exists-to experienced graduate-level (MA/MFA)
writers from around the Institute. The focus of
the class is on student writing projects, which
are shared and discussed in intensive class
sessions. The first third of the class is given
over to readings and writing prompts that help to
frame and inspire student writing projects and
classroom discussions. In alternating years the
course's reading and prompts will focus on either
Form and Poetic Practice or on Address and Poetic
Sociality. (In Spring 2021 the course focus will
be on Form and Practice. In the '21-'22 academic
year it will be on Address and Poetic Sociality.
The topics will continue to alternate by year
thereafter.)
When the workshop focuses on Form and Poetic
Practice, we will be looking at the form and
practice of making poems both on and off the page.
We will look at traditional poetic forms like the
sonnet, examining how modern and contemporary
free-verse poets have re-purposed the form. We
will also look at exciting invented forms of a
number of modern and contemporary poets, and at
the use of organic, open-page forms as well. At
the same time we will be looking at the poetic
practices of a number of innovative and
influential poets and writers, and how poem-making
becomes a "form of life." Poets we read may
include CA Conrad, Douglas Kearney, William
Shakespeare, Bernadette Mayer, Joshua Beckman,
Terrance Hayes, Maureen Owen, Noelle Kocot, Hoa
Nguyen, Ted Berrigan, Cedar Sigo, Larry Eigner,
John Cage, Catherine Wagner and others.
When the workshop focuses on Address and Poetic
Sociality it will pay special attention to the
relational spaces made by poems-to the places we
go to when we read and write poetry. Why do we
wish to keep building these spaces and returning
to them, as we do each time we write and read?
What is the role of direct address in the
conjuring of these spaces? We will be asking these
questions and many more as we examine what these
imaginative spaces are, how they are made,
invested with life, and kept alive. Readings and
writing prompts will help us explore this
ambiguous terrain that can be seen, in the words
of the poet Peter Gizzi, as "100% real and 100%
imaginary." We will be especially interested in
the
role of death in all this, in how poems make it
possible to live a distant and yet intimate
companionship with the dead and the living, a
companionship we might choose to call
"necrosocial." The political possibilities-and
limits-of literary (necro)sociality will also be a
concern. The course reading list may include work
from Jack Spicer, Claudia Rankine, Dorothea Lasky,
Fred Moten, Alice Notley, John Ashbery, Graham
Foust, Dolores Dorantes and John Keats.