Possible Future Poetry Classes
Below are possible poetry classes that may be offered in the future. They’re not open for registration, though you can sign up for email updates on a particular class using the form on each class page. Which classes open in the future will depend on which classes get the most interest – so please do sign up for updates if you want to see a class happen! Entering your email for more than one class is encouraged. Signing up for updates does not commit you to taking the class. Click here for more information about Ah – the Sea classes.
Read With Me: Emily Dickinson
Almost completely unknown during her lifetime, and still often misunderstood today, Emily Dickinson’s influence on American poetry is only rivaled by Whitman (who perhaps has more global impact but may be less of a force than Dickinson in the contemporary US)… (read more)
Beyond Rupi Kaur: The Art and Strategy of Instagram Poetry
This three-hour workshop is intended for those curious to learn more about this new poetry frontier (no matter your degree of enthusiasm or skepticism) from another poet who has waded in, observed, and experimented with using Instagram to share her own work… (read more)
THE LIMIT: Shaking Up Your Poetic Sensibilities
This course intends to shake up your idea of what poetry can be by introducing you to a variety of work, all with some “official” endorsement as poetry, operating at different frontiers (limits) of literature… (read more)
Read With Me: Sleeping with the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen
Though, as The Rumpus says, these poems are “naughty rule-breaking things, messy and eclectic by design,” Mullen’s colleague Stephen Yenser points out that she is also “deeply traditional.” A number of reviewers laud Mullen for her “serious play:” there is a fun surface, but also substance… (read more)
The Poet’s Guide to Submitting to Literary Journals
In this three-hour workshop, you’ll bring in some poems and lots of questions, and leave with a submission packet and clear next steps for exactly where to send it. Depending on how ready you feel your work is, if you take an extra 30 minutes after the class you could have your shiny new packet waiting in an editor’s inbox before the end of the day.… (read more)
60-Day Traditional Meter Challenge
With the assumption that learning about traditional meter in English can help us become more aware participants in the centuries-old poetic conversation, let’s set aside a little time to dive in… (read more)
The Music of Langston Hughes
Hughes’s contribution towards helping American poetry break from English traditions has been enormous. This course will consider his poems in the context of the African-American music that influenced his work and the later poets he inspired, such as Yusef Komunyaaka, Sonia Sanchez, and Jack Kerouac and his “spontaneous bop prosody.” (read more)
Read With Me: Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman has been called the father of American poetry, as well as the father of American free verse. “Song of Myself” was his introduction to the world. Controversial when it was first self-published, it’s now hard to find a list, no matter how short, of “great American poems” that doesn’t include it… (read more)
Read With Me: Poets.org Poem-a-Day
One of the best resources I’ve found for getting a glimpse of what poets are doing today, especially up-and-coming poets, is the Poem-a-Day email sent out by the Academy of American Poets. Join me for one week and we’ll see what we find. What might happen if you closely read a poem every day? (read more)
Read With Me: Tender Buttons By Gertrude Stein
While she’s often forgotten by the general public or ignored by formalists as an unwelcome aberration, Gertrude Stein has been a powerful force in some branches of poetry. Tender Buttons (published in 1914), one of her most influential books, was praised by writers like Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, and Mina Loy… (read more)
Poetry Revision Lab
An open-ended exploration of revision. Topics will likely include easy revision exercises that will shake up how you’re thinking about your poem and introduce a sense of play to what can sometimes be a very cerebral process, an examination of the myths about revision, detailed examples from my own work of how one poet goes about revising… (read more)
Image credits (left to right, starting top row):
Digitally restored black and white daguerrotype of Emily Dickinson, c. early 1847.
Photo by Benyamin Bohlouli.
Starry Sky: Snowfall at Canyon. Yellowstone National Park. Jim Peaco. November 2013.
University of California Press.
Typewriter photo by Thom Milkovic.
Cathedral Dome by Nathalie E. Julien.
Langston Hughes photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1936.
Walt Whitman, age 36, circa 1855.
Trinity College Library, Dublin. Peter Heeling, 2017.
Juan Gris. Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux (Still life with checkered tablecloth), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Leonard A. Lauder collection.
Isaac Weissenbruch. Menselijk oog met een afwijking (Human eye with an abnormality), Rijksmuseum.