Poetry

This workshop is a celebration and study of the life and work of Reuben Jackson who mentored generations of writers and taught at The Writer’s Center for over a decade. During the course of five sessions together, we will write vignettes about our interactions with this top-shelf teacher, poet, and jazz scholar. In addition, we will carefully read his poetry and use them as generative prompts to create new work. We will culminate this workshop at The Writer’s Center in a public reading/celebration to honor Mr. Jackson and keep his literary legacy alive on October 4.

Ekphratic Poetry or poetry in conversation with art can seem formulaic; see a piece of art and use elements of it in a poem I am making. But why stop there? In this generative workshop, participants will be encouraged to embody their piece of art (visual, music, or dance) as a means of saying what only they can say about that piece of art. Students will learn many different approaches to ekphrasis and will leave with a draft of a new poem.

We will write response poems and learn from the strategies of this early Modernist poet who still intrigues well into the Post Modernism of today. Let’s investigate and play with Stein’s words such as, “The sudden spoon is the same in no size” or “grass greediness” or “a white hunter is nearly crazy.”

Delve into a poem’s visual language. Participants will learn techniques that poets use every day to form undeniably poignant work. Generative writing exercises and examples will encourage participants to view their writing in a new way. With multiple works written in-workshop, place your pieces in a small portfolio. This workshop emphasizes the poetic line and varying syntax. Participants will leave with more strategies to begin a poem and vary their syntax.

The cento and the bop offer poets two radically different ways to make language communal, musical, and newly strange. Through close reading, discussion, generative exercises, and brief sharing, participants will explore the cento’s collage of borrowed lines and the bop’s movement through argument, refrain, and release. We will consider quotation, attribution, sonic pattern, cultural memory, ekphrasis, and the productive tension between influence and originality. By the end of the workshop, each participant will have drafted either a complete cento or the central architecture of a bop, along with strategies for revising it. No preparation is required, though participants may bring a favorite poem, song lyric, artwork, or small collection of language they would like to work from.

The proposal builds directly from the attached materials’ treatment of the cento as a composite of previously written lines and the bop as a 23-line form organized into three stanzas with recurring refrains.
The materials also frame both forms as methods of historical looking, cultural recombination, and resistance to narrow ideas of authorship.

Here’s an opportunity to shed any misconception that poetic forms are only constricting. We will do brief writing exercises that use the enchantment of meter and rhyme to free your deeper imagination. After exploring several traditional forms, we will experiment with creating improvised (nonce) forms. Participants may leave with at least one new draft poem and ideas for creating more.

We will read and write poems that increase our knowledge of war and peacemaking, We will seek to define terms. What is war? What is a poem written in the wake of a bombing? Who has the right to write the poem? Does poetry make something happen? Can we save ourselves, our communities, our countries by writing?

The goal of this course is to introduce the participant to three Japanese poetic forms: the haiku, tanka, and senryu and guide a writing practice that includes these forms. Each week the participant will read examples of poetry in one of the Japanese forms and then generate some poems. By the end of the workshop, the participant will have generated poems in the three Japanese forms and feel confident in writing in these forms.

Whether you have just started your manuscript, or have made significant progress, this course will help you get over the finish line. We'll learn how to structure the book in a way that adds layers of meaning to the poems within, generate new work to fill in the structure, and hone poems until they are book-ready. To finish, students will revise the book as a whole and make a publication plan.

Trauma can shut us down; writing poems can help free us to open up again. This workshop will present some of the many ways poetry has helped writers both heal trauma and prevent post-traumatic stress syndrome. Guided by an internationally published poet and health journalist, you will explore the science behind this and learn a range of techniques, immediately putting several of them to use in drafting new work. The workshop includes reading and discussion of time-honored poems, close attention to emotional and sensory aspects of poetry, several in-class writing exercises, and feedback on poems for those who wish to share them. (NOTE: All sharing is optional. This workshop is not a substitute for therapy.)

Writing Yourself into a Person Your Poetry Can Be Proud Of is a workshop about using poetry not only to document your life, but to deepen your attention, integrity, and creative presence within it. Each week, participants will read and discuss poems that model artistic courage, self-examination, and transformation, alongside generative writing exercises designed to help them develop their own voice and habits of observation. Sessions will combine close reading, guided writing prompts, voluntary sharing, and constructive discussion in a supportive workshop environment. By the end of the workshop, participants will have produced a portfolio of new poems and a clearer understanding of the relationship between the life they live and the art they create. Preparation for the first class: Please bring one poem you admire and one poem of your own (published or unpublished) that feels representative of where you are as a writer right now.

When you have an idea for a poem but aren’t sure where to start, try a triolet. This eight-line framework can become a powerful poem, or a stanza in a larger one. We’ll start by reading time-honored triolets to see how and why they work. Next we’ll write one together, then individually, with time at the end for feedback.

Go beyond nature and love poetry to explore how you live and work in the suburb/city. Participants each week can expect to learn about basic poetry elements, such as line, image, point of view, and rhythm/music, as well as workshop poems each class as a group. Students will also learn how the themes of suburb/city can be used to create poetry that has relevance and purpose for readers and editors. By the end of the class, participants will learn how to go beyond their normal subjects for poems, as well as revise at least one poem.

We all read for pleasure, but a writer also reads to learn. It feeds a writer’s writing practice. In this generative workshop, each week we will become familiar with the work of an established poet as a means to examine elements of craft and draft their own poems. This course also includes an optional workshopping element to receive feedback from your peers and the instructor.

“Whole-Brain Poetry” is an opportunity to explore some of the many ways poetry interacts with the brain, and to enrich your writing with that knowledge. This includes but goes beyond the use of metaphor. Through writing exercises, close examination of time-honored and recent poems, workshopping of participant poems, and brief reading assignments, we will examine the neurology and psychology of poetry, the relationship between time and memory, how science has influenced well-known poets, how poetry can help to heal trauma and prevent PTSD, and more.

This workshop will offer a lecture each week, followed by workshoping participants’ poems. The class will focus on the elements of story, musicality, figuration, and most of all feeling. Open to all poets at all levels, who are curious about poetry and its craft and tools for revision.

There is no "right" or "wrong" when it comes to deciding how a poem should end. But there are some options that might be more effective than others. This workshop will focus on closure—the strategies that poets have traditionally used to bring their poems to a clear, resonant conclusion. We will also discuss anti-closure—the resistance that so many feel toward poems that “click shut.” By looking at the work of several contemporary poets, we will discuss what worked best for their poems and might help yours.

This intensive one-day workshop will offer all poets—whether they have yet to submit their first poem to a literary journal or are ready to present a publisher with a book-length manuscript—hands-on advice on how to achieve their publishing goals.

How poets handle syntax—the arrangement of words in a sentence—is crucial to everything from establishing the voice of a poem to evoking a particular response from the reader. In this workshop, we will take a close look at how sentences are put together and how changing their structure can send a poem off in a new direction. We will also examine the relationship between the sentence and the line and how to control the tension between them.

Guided by an award-winning and internationally published author of sonnets, villanelles, and other metrical poems, you’ll first read time-honored sonnets to see how and why they work. Next the class will write a group sonnet, and then -- with or without shortcuts -- you’ll start one of your own. You’ll leave with at least one new (draft) or improved sonnet, as well as insights about how writing poems in form can unlock deeper meaning and enhance everything you write.