How are you inviting or challenging your readers to ask these questions with you, with your language?

Over six online workshop sessions, we will take a deep dive into craft, process, and the vast array of what contemporary poetry and poetics have to offer us, alongside a historical view of the art form. We will keep at the forefront Lucille Clifton’s beautiful statement that poetry is “a way of living in the world” and that “you come to poetry not out of what you know, but out of what you wonder.”

Designed for intermediate to advanced poets, this course is rooted in serious engagement with participants’ work in progress. Compassionate, nuanced, and rigorous feedback is at the heart of our time together. Generative writing prompts will be shared both during and in between class sessions, so you will also have the chance to create new work during this period.

In addition to discussing and critiquing your drafts, we will closely read and collectively examine poetry by a wide range of writers, including Muriel Leung, Solmaz Sharif, Yanyi, Joseph O. Legaspi, Nina Mingya Powles, Benjamin Garcia, Aracelis Girmay, Victoria Chang, Rick Barot, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Renia White, Eduardo C. Corral, Jay Gao, Diane Seuss, Natalie Diaz, Jericho Brown, and others. We will also read excerpts from two prose books on craft and the writer’s life—Carl Phillips’s My Trade Is Mystery and Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey. All readings will be provided via Google docs or PDFs.

Participants can expect to receive detailed verbal as well as written feedback, including line edits, and by the end of the course, to have written six new poems and to have revised at least four poems. Please come prepared to fully participate in all discussions—and to experiment wildly, to dream strangely, to inquire fiercely.