24Pearlstreet Workshops
Kim Addonizio’s class won’t just inspire you to write—it will also help you shape your poems in order to release the power and energy of your vision.
Sure, our poems need heart, mind, fresh metaphors, precise language, ravishing imagery—but they also need structure. How can you shape a poem about events in the past? What are the possibilities of elegy? How do you avoid getting stuck in mere description? In this workshop, we’ll explore a few ways that poems can proceed, and we’ll jump off from discussing some examples to writing our own. We’ll talk about the concept of the turn, and study how poems move so they aren’t only one note, but also take us somewhere new and surprise us. We’ll look at poems from the likes of Linda Gregg, Jean Valentine, Rilke, and others, as well as do writing assignments that will inspire new work and give you ways to approach your earlier drafts. This is a class that will benefit poets at any level. Whether you want to create new poems or revise older ones, you’ll finish the workshop with some useful tools to help you shape your material.
Biography
Kim Addonizio is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose. Her most recent poetry collection is Now We’re Getting Somewhere (W.W. Norton). Her memoir-in-essays, Bukowski in a Sundress, was published by Penguin. She has received NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and the essay, and her poetry has been widely translated and anthologized. Tell Me was a National Book Award Finalist in poetry. She lives in Oakland, CA.