Fine Arts Work Center In Provincetown

24Pearlstreet Workshops

Fred Marchant Staying With It: A Five-Day Meditation in Poetry Poetry March 26 to March 30, 2018 Tuition: $400 Class Size: 12 Session: spring Level: 1 week asynchronous workshop

In this one-week intensive online course we will begin a new poem and stay with it for the whole five days, the goal being to nurture and expand that poem into an extended meditation. We will consider what a meditative poem is and does, and why one might want to write one. We will study the many ways a poem might be sustained and expanded. We will listen to what the poem itself is suggesting about what and where the next steps are, and we will think of what threads might weave a sequence of poems together into a whole fabric. In this effort we will examine the how hybrid forms, variant dictions, dissonant topics, and idiosyncratic rhetorical stances might point us toward new energies and possibilities. Each of you will be asked to post new elements of your poem daily. You will all be invited to respond to the work that is posted. In addition, we will read and discuss meditative poems and/or poetic sequences by such writers as Anne Carson, Martha Collins, Nick Flynn, Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, Brenda Hillman, Czeslaw Milosz, Claudia Rankine, Kevin Young, and Natasha Trethewey, among others. By the end of our week together you should have not only a grounding in the poetics of a sustained meditation, you should also have a poem that in itself bears witness to the virtues of “staying with it.” At the end of the class I’ll email each student with thoughts about your work and individualized ideas for going forward.

Biography

Fred Marchant is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which is Said Not Said (Graywolf Press, 2017). Earlier books include Full Moon Boat, The Looking House, Tipping Point, and House on Water, House in Air. Marchant has co-translated work by several Vietnamese poets, and edited Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford. An emeritus professor of English, he is founding director of the Suffolk University Poetry Center in Boston.