Courses

Poets have strategies to make their writing feel less like work and more like play, even when writing about serious subjects. We will learn to silence our inner critics and enjoy the art of writing poetry through techniques such as improv comedy-inspired exercises, lessons from Beyoncé about the repetitions of the sonnet, and the use of concrete nouns to keep a poem moving. We will keep notebooks to gather language for poetry from our daily lives and experiment with adapting texts not typically thought of as poetic, such as advertisements, advice columns, and instruction manuals. In each class session, we will begin by looking closely at poems by established poets. You will then write a new poem in response to a prompt emerging from our conversations. You will leave with a portfolio of new work and a renewed sense of how to play and why it matters.