POET 42 — Poetry as Play: Poetry Workshop
Quarter: Summer
Instructor(s): David Gorin
Date(s): Jun 22—Aug 10
Class Recording Available: No
Class Meeting Day: Mondays
Class Meeting Time: 6:00—8:30 pm (PT)
Tuition: $825
Refund Deadline: Jun 24
Unit(s): 2
Enrollment Limit: 18
Status: Registration opens May 18, 8:30 am (PT)
Quarter: Summer
Day: Mondays
Duration: 8 weeks
Time: 6:00—8:30 pm (PT)
Date(s): Jun 22—Aug 10
Unit(s): 2
Tuition: $825
Refund Deadline: Jun 24
Instructor(s): David Gorin
Enrollment Limit: 18
Recording Available: No
Status: Registration opens May 18, 8:30 am (PT)
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.
This course is intended for beginning and advanced writers of poetry alike, and it would also benefit writers of prose and song and any art where play occurs. For students who have previously taken the course, the structure is the same but the content is new. Past students are encouraged to join.
DAVID GORIN
Poet
David Gorin is the author of To a Distant Country, selected by Jennifer Chang for the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, The Believer, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He received the 2023 Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America and has been supported by MacDowell, Yaddo, and Millay Arts. Gorin has taught creative writing and literature at Yale, Deep Springs College, Eastern Correctional Facility, and the Pratt Institute, where he was a visiting assistant professor of humanities and media studies. He received an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MPhil in English literature from Yale. He is a 2026–2028 Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford.Textbooks for this course:
There are no required textbooks; however, some fee-based online readings may be assigned.