2024 Summer Workshops
Why do these things feel impossible to write? How can a poem risk vulnerability without crushing us under the weight of sentimentality? Why are so many love poems so very sad? How can the abstract experience of a specific emotion be made tangible? How can you write a poem that will make someone fall in love with you? This class will answer each of those questions except for the last one. This will be a generative workshop. We’ll work to emerge one week later with new poems and full hearts.
Biography
Matthew Olzmann's newest book, Constellation Route, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in January 2022. He’s the author of two prior collections of poems, Mezzanines and Contradictions in the Design. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Kresge Arts Foundation, and Kundiman, Olzmann's poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Southern Review, and elsewhere. He is a Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.