2025 Summer Workshops
What is the end of a poem? What is its function? What makes one ending stronger than another? What do you do with a line you think “would make a good ending of a poem” that you have yet to write or perhaps even to conceive of? How does the end of a poem differ from the end of a collection? Can, even should, we consider them relational? When should you sacrifice sense or accretion in your poem for a randomly great ending? Do poems even really end? If so, why? This workshop concerns the effect and idea of the end of a poem as both protagonist and antagonist of your own writing. We will study poems, in finished form and midst revision, from antiquity to the present in concert with your own poems in an intensive inquiry into the power, the glory and the myth of the end.
Biography
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of The Ground, Heaven, When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness, The Circuit: a Tennis Odyssey, and Living Weapon. He has been the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the GLCA New Writers Award, the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, the PEN/Osterweil Prize for Poetry, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.