2023 Summer Workshops
In this generative workshop, you will focus on different syntactic strategies for writing poems. Through the reading of published poems and the writing of daily exercises, you’ll explore ways to vary and extend the predictable subject-verb-object sentence (“I love you”), and in the process discuss ways in which syntax and prosody—sentence and line—work together to create complex poetic textures. You should leave the workshop with the beginnings of at least four new poems, some of which we’ll discuss in class, as well as a number of starting points for other poems.
Please bring 11 copies of one poem for possible reading and brief discussion at the beginning of the workshop, and have other poems available for possible discussion later.
Biography
In this generative workshop, you will focus on different syntactic strategies for writing poems. Through the reading of published poems and the writing of daily exercises, you'll explore ways to vary and extend the predictable subject-verb-object sentence (“I love you”), and in the process discuss ways in which syntax and prosody—sentence and line—work together to create complex poetic textures. You should leave the workshop with the beginnings of at least four new poems, some of which we’ll discuss in class, as well as a number of starting points for other poems.
Please bring 11 copies of one poem for possible reading and brief discussion at the beginning of the workshop, and have other poems available for possible discussion later.