Decades ago, Lyn Coffin was on the SLAM team Ann Arbor sent to the National competition in Austin, Texas. She was inspired by the many great performance poems she heard and has a deep love of performance poetry, as well as “academic” or formal poetry. Almost the entire class will be devoted to workshopping the […]

Are you a painter, photographer, cartoonist, sculptor AND poet? What are the possibilities and pitfalls of inviting your own visual art to rest alongside poetry? How can image and text sing, complicate, harmonize with and not merely repeat one another? From broadsides to haibun to erasures to other pairings, we’ll examine and explore how the […]

I believe that empathy is one of the most powerful ingredients found in the creative act of writing. In this spirit we will visit the celebratory form of odes: briefly look at its history, read some examples from Neruda and others, and write one ourselves though not to a Grecian Urn but instead to a perceived enemy.