Do your poems ignite in form or flurry? Are you a counter, a feeler, a connector, or a mess? A tinkerer or an iterator? Do your lines tend to blossom or knot? In this poetry workshop we’ll read and respond to participant poems with attention to control and chaos (not mutually exclusive) and how they manifest in one’s subjects, processes, revision practices, and endings. This class will be generative, joyful, energetic, and inquisitive. We’ll begin the week by sharing participant-made “calibration bouquets” (a small collection of what influences or provokes your writing) in order to quickly get to know each other’s work. Though our discussions will center participant writing, we’ll also take a look at poems by Lo Kwa Mei-en, Harryette Mullen, Oliver Baez Bendorf, and Lauren Shapiro—all writers interested in the intersection of turmoil and structure. This workshop is open to poets at all levels with a desire to explore what makes a poem fit together or fall apart. Each participant will workshop at least three poems, and our week together will include a one-on-one conference and personalized reading list. In this workshop, we will offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week; workshop writing you bring from home.

In this team-taught, generative workshop, poet Caryl Pagel and fiction writer Madeline McDonnell will wage a battle for generic dominance, trying to win students over either to the side of poetry or fiction once and for all, because writing is a zero-sum game. Just kidding! In fact, Caryl and Madeline will help poets find their inner liars, and fiction writers their inner lyres. We will spend the weekend collaboratively reading poems and short works of fiction, exploring their correspondences and conversations in form and content, and then completing exercises engaging the strategies discussed. All the while, we will consider: How might we find plots in prosody and lyrics inside story arcs? What’s the difference between poetry and fiction, anyway? Does it matter? Students should expect to emerge with the starts of several new pieces—but will they be poems, stories? Stoems? Pories? We don’t know, but they will definitely be magic! In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.