COURSES, WORKSHOPS, & CONSULTATIONS

Haunting and the Haunted: Finding and the Honing the Poetry of Place

How do we use image, language, form, and sound to set down our towns, our neighborhoods, and the cities we live in such a way that words capture the truth of a place? How do we resist sentimentality while perhaps welcoming a place’s own particular mythology? Tyler Malone has written, “The city resists being seen as pure architecture or pure activity. We mistake the city if we take it for mere setting or plot. The city is character; it breathes its own life, speaks in its own tongue, moves to its own rhythms.” In this workshop we will write, workshop, revise and research to craft poems that attempt to find the breath, the language, the music and character of the places that make us, that break us, that create us through our own survival. We will read poets such as Richard Hugo, Major Jackson, Natasha Tretheway, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Alberto Rios and explore the ways in and out of the places that haunt us and in which we, as poets, haunt.

Tiny Tales, Prose Poems, and Micro Memoirs

This class will wade into those estuaries where the waters of genre blend and mingle and birth something new. We will try to blend the lyrical intensity of the poem with the narrative movement of the story as well as the wandering discovery of the essay. We will write untethered from the poetic line yet bound by the infinite space of a nutshell all while traveling on the turtle back of the sentence. We will question how much we owe the facts and how much we owe to truth and what perhaps is the difference between the two. The work we will produce will be short yet will hopefully contain the arc of human existence, the universe squeezed into a ball. We will read Carolyn Forche, Robert Hass, Julia Alvarez, Andre Dubus, Margaret Atwood and others; each student will receive an email appraising their work at the end of the class, offering suggestions for further reading and revision.

The Lyrical Littoral: The Sea as a Source for Poetry

“Whenever it is a damp, drizzly, November in my soul,” says Ishmael in the opening pages of Moby Dick, “I account it is high time to get to water as soon as I can.” In this generative workshop we will do just that, get to the water, at least with our words. We will look at the sea, specifically the littoral zone of the Atlantic coast, as a source for language, image, experience, metaphor, and inspiration. We will consider the sea as our shared biosphere where fishermen grind out a living on dwindling catches, where surfers slip into winter wetsuits to take on Nor’easter swells, where summer sandcastles topple with the tide, and where lovers hold out for the promise of sunrise. Taking a look at sea inspired poems and culling from our intimate relationship with water, we will then generate and share poems of our own.