I’ll be leading a poetry workshop at the Stonecoast MFA program as well as a pop-up workshop called “Your poem is leaking all over the place” and you can't remember the name of thingamajig. Below you can see the description of the workshop!

In this workshop, we name the tools that make up wonders.  We will talk about poetic vocabulary - ghazal, couplet, enjambment, anaphora, epigraph versus epigram,etc - and examine the language that names what a poet does through practice.  Together we will study those terms in practice through the works of writers from historically and systemically marginalized communities.  We will do close readings of poems, analyze how they function, create the rules, write with those rules (wild cards), and then learn how to break the rules with abandon!  In the workshopping of generative work, we will use anti-racist writing workshop strategies.  

Required reading/Watching

• Maurice Carlos Ruffin readings "enemies" by Lucille Clifton

• Elizabeth Acevedo reads "blessing the boats" by Lucille Clifton

• Rachel Elizabeth Griffiths reads "Jasper Texas 1998" by Lucille Clifton

• Aracelis Girmay, "For Estefani"

• Agha Shahid Ali, "Ghazal"

• Patricia Smith, "Motown Sonnet" and here it is performed

• Visual Poetry

Practice

After reading/watching, choose one of the poems to dissect for number of lines, line length, meter, repetition, dominant images, the objects within the poem, the form the poem uses, the effect of the lines breaking where they do and starting where they do, and how the poet uses the page (or how the performance of it adds to the poem).  

Suggested reading/watching (or practices)

• An exaltation of forms:  Poets celebrate the diversity of their art, edited by Annie Finch & Kathrine Varnes

• Glossary of Poetic Terms, The Poetry Foundation

• Coursera course from Douglas Kearney:  Sharpened Visions:  A Poetry Workshop

• Cave Canem and CAAPP reading:  From Way Out Where:  The Black Avant Garde