Invitation & Inquiry:
A Revision-Centred Poetry Workshop
with Chen Chen
Designed for intermediate to advanced poets, this online course is rooted in serious engagement with participants’ work in progress. Compassionate, nuanced, and rigorous feedback will be at the heart of your time together with Chen Chen. Generative writing prompts will be shared, so you will also have the chance to create new work during this period.
Registration closes: 28 May 2023, Sunday, 23:59 hrs SGT
![Courses Writing](https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/acwp/files/2020/03/Courses-Writing.png)
Summary
Course code: CC1
6 online workshops of 2.5 hours each
For Intermediate to Advanced Poets
Limited Places available
Selective entry – we’ll offer places to writers based on writing samples sent on application
Dates
6 online workshops on:
- 17 June 2023, Saturday
- 24 June 2023, Saturday
- 1 July 2023, Saturday
- 8 July 2023, Saturday
- 15 July 2023, Saturday
- 22 July 2023, Saturday
8:30 am to 11 am SGT
No partial sessions accepted
Venue
Workshops will take place online via Zoom
Successful participants will receive a private link to the workshops.
Overview
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.
Learning Outcomes
- Developed their drafting and revising skills
- Expanded their abilities to provide and to receive and incorporate critical feedback
- Deepened their attention to the questions that inform their creative work and complicating the inquiry pursued within the work
- Furthered their craft knowledge and awareness of their own idiosyncratic writing process; and built a literary community steeped in care, accountability, and imagination.
Please note participants are required to attend all 6 online sessions.
Who should register?
- Intermediate Writers — Writers who have chosen to pursue writing as a full time or part time career with a serious, professional intent but who are not yet published with a mainstream or recognised independent publisher, or
- Advanced Writers — Writers who have published at least one book with a mainstream or recognised independent publisher, and/or published in at least one literary journal and/or anthology
Participants will be selected by the Visiting Writer with assistance from the Asia Creative Writing Programme. A waiting list will be maintained.
Registration and Pricing
Course Prerequisites
To sign up, please register at the link above with the following documents:
- A 500 word writing sample or 2 to 5 poems
- A short summary of your writing project of ~50 to 100 words
- A short biography of ~50 to 100 words
If you have registered with us before, you may send the same information again with an updated bio.
Course Fees
- For 6 workshops of 2.5 hours each:
- $180 for adults
- $60 for students (non Singapore tertiary institutions), unemployed, low income migrant workers
- Free for undergraduates and post graduates from Singapore tertiary institutions
- Non-refundable if cancellation 2 weeks or less before course starts
- Please email us if financial assistance is needed
About Chen Chen
Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (BOA Editions, 2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. His work appears in many publications, including Poetry and three editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, the National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists. He was the 2018-2022 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University and currently teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College and Stonecoast. He lives with his partner, Jeff Gilbert, and their pug, Mr. Rupert Giles.