We’re constantly seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching things in the world…and we inevitably compare what we sense with other things. These acts of comparison—seeing one thing as or like another—are at the heart of poetic making. On Day 1 we’ll enjoy reading model poems and try fun exercises that highlight how metaphor helps working minds naturally (and evocatively) move from sensory perception into realms of thinking and feeling. On Day 2 we'll explore how metaphor sustains different poetic forms—in particular, the sonnet, the pastoral, and the elegy—and consider figurative strategies that 1) liberate formal parameters, 2) sustain and challenge our ideas of place, and 3) generate, out of absence or the threat of loss, vivid and satisfying poems. An excellent course for poets of all levels and for fiction writers who want to explore the power of metaphor.

In this workshop, we will generate new writing through exercises and assignments.

In Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau re-imagines one brief narrative... in 99 different versions. We won't get that obsessive in our week together, but we will read a number of poets from different "schools" and carefully listen to different modes of expression that might help us re-work our own poems. How might Romantic, Modernist, Confessional, Objectivist, New York School, and Oulipo voices help us to see our subjects and our language differently? Don’t worry if you’re unfamiliar with these various schools of expression—just know that we'll use a playful variety of syntactical, musical, and rhetorical strategies to revise our poems, trusting our eyes and ears to take in and learn from what others have done over time. Lively discussions of individual poems and major poetic movements, along with liberating and exploratory exercises, will inspire us to revisit our own work. When you come to Iowa City, bring three of your own lyric poems that you'd like to re-envision in multiple ways.

In this workshop, we will generate new writing through exercises and assignments; provide feedback on writing brought from home as we revise poems in class.

We’ll take a patient look at two revered American poets, spending a day on each of these marvelous lyricists, specifically poems from the collections The Wild Iris and The Tradition. Both poets generate layered and complex poems that don’t shy away from vulnerability, that openly court and create beauty in both image and music, and that bravely face what’s unknown, bewildering, and even violent in both real and imagined landscapes. In training our focus and collective attention to styles and subject matter present in a handful of poems, we'll translate our close reading and appreciation into multiple drafts of poems that both borrow from our reading and bear our own singular stamp.

On Saturday we’ll start with some poems from the 2020 Nobel Prize winner’s 1992 collection, The Wild Iris. We’ll read the poems through a writer’s lens: how does this poet use voice, image, metaphor, music, and structure to create its effects on a reader? And how might we play with such effects in our own poems? We’ll then roll up our sleeves and generate our own poems off of what we discover and discuss from our reading. Sunday, we’ll turn to The Tradition, the 2020 winner of the Pulitzer Prize and continue with a similar day of reading into writing. Students are encouraged to purchase the collections by each poet prior to arriving in Iowa City, as I’ll ask participants to read a few poems by each poet before we meet – that way we can hit the ground running! Lovers of poetry at all levels of experience are welcome.

In this workshop, we will generate new writing through exercises and assignments.