2024 Summer Workshops
This workshop is part of our Poetry Festival.
This class will look at moments of distraction, digression, unexpected juxtapositions and idiosyncratic leaps of thought. We’ll examine the ways these shifts in focus can generate surprise and create resonant turns. For the highly distracted poet, this might be a class on how to harness that disarray into something workable. For the poet with a more disciplined attention span, this could be a session on how to bring a greater degree of flexibility and play into the writing. What was I talking about? Wait. I remember! This will be a generative class. We’ll write and workshop new poems.
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.