Class Type: Poetry

From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter, words have been used to convey messages for the people. Join Affrilachian Poet JC McPherson in an exploration of what makes these poems shout from the page. What makes them resonate across time? What can we learn from these voices? How ...

In this class, we will happily get lost in the details of poetry. We will revel in the sounds, zigzag through the commas, tap to the rhythms of the lines, vibrate with the verbs. We will submit poems and workshop them, will study books, dissect examples. As time allows, each ...

Poetry is often used to describe awe-inspiring views and vistas. Poets often sing of their travels across the world and the country through their verse. It is the language of beauty that can be hard to describe. But what happens to the exploration of place in poetry when there’s a ...

Writing erasure or blackout poems can help us protest injustice, counteract historical erasures, reveal layers in a source text, and even uncover our own buried thoughts and feelings. In this class, we’ll read erasures by Kiki Petrosino, Tarfia Faizullah, Sarah J. Sloat, and other poets to analyze what makes their ...

This class will study seriously good poems that make us laugh. We will read contemporary poets including Les Murray, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ross Gay, Billy Collins, Ruth Stone, and others, and examine the ways in which their work accomplishes a comedic effect, even as the poems are about grief, loss, or ...

In this generative workshop, we examine the intersections of poetry and prose. We discuss the differences and similarities as we read works by renowned poets, working with different elements of craft each week. By looking at the poems and prose in relationship to each other, participants will be able to ...

Over the centuries the sonnet has been an amazingly elastic form, adapted and even subverted in the service of rebelling against the tradition it represents. The form has been remade to suit the language of its composition or the style of its writer or the demands of the historical and ...

Too often, poetry gets a reputation as being inaccessible, uptight, or strictly academic. When folks think of this literary genre, they often think of structure and stanza, lineation, and limitation. It can be tedious and intimidating to consider. But poetry stripped down to the bare bones is much more! It ...

Whether it is Robert Frost’s walk through the woods on a snowy evening or Billy Collins’ creation of a lanyard at camp, specific events often serve as an anchor for poems that capture the mystery, majesty, and humor of life. In this seminar, we’ll examine several poems that use specific ...