POET 44 — Poetry Workshop: Talking in Things
Quarter: Winter
Instructor(s): David Gorin
Date(s): Jan 13—Mar 17
Class Recording Available: No
Class Meeting Day: Mondays
Class Meeting Time: 6:00—8:30 pm (PT)
Please Note: No class on January 20 and February 17
Tuition: $825
Refund Deadline: Jan 15
Unit(s): 2
Enrollment Limit: 18
Status: Registration opens Dec 2, 8:30 am (PT)
Quarter: Winter
Day: Mondays
Duration: 8 weeks
Time: 6:00—8:30 pm (PT)
Date(s): Jan 13—Mar 17
Unit(s): 2
Tuition: $825
Refund Deadline: Jan 15
Instructor(s): David Gorin
Enrollment Limit: 18
Recording Available: No
Status: Registration opens Dec 2, 8:30 am (PT)
Please Note: No class on January 20 and February 17
In this generative poetry workshop, we will explore the pleasure and power of talking in things—that is, using concrete nouns in poems. Learning to “talk in things” is the swiftest way to increase the power of your writing and make its generation faster and more fun. We will keep notebooks to capture concrete details from our memories and daily lives to infuse our poems with that power. We will practice techniques adapted from improv comedy and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities to help realize our own imaginary places. We will write discernibly about what has not happened and explore how ancient Chinese and Japanese poets used nouns to create a sense of time and world. We will even discover how the noun-generation power of AI can prompt us to invent unprecedented things to say. And, of course, we will look to modern and contemporary poets, including Langston Hughes, Louise Glück, Mary Ruefle, and Ada Limón, as our guides. In each class session, we will begin by looking closely at poems published by others and then talk about poems you have made. Each week, you will write a new poem in reply to a prompt emerging from our conversations. You will leave the course with a portfolio of new work, a new community of peers, and a new sense of how to “talk in things.”
DAVID GORIN
Poet
David Gorin is the author of the forthcoming To a Distant Country, selected by Jennifer Chang for the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. His writing appears 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 and Millay Arts. Gorin has taught creative writing and literature at Yale, Deep Springs College, Eastern Correctional Facility (via the Bard Prison Initiative), 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. Textbooks for this course:
There are no required textbooks; however, some fee-based online readings may be assigned.