If one looks up the nomenclature, Documentary Poetics, one quickly learns there is much interest and debate surrounding the term: What is the difference between Poetry of Witness and Documentary Poetics? Does Documentary Poetics inherently contain a political narrative or position? Titles and debates aside, the idea of using a third point of reference in the construction of a poem is worth investigating. In fact, it is something that poets have been investigating for a long, long time. In our time together we will read works by William Carlos Williams, Muriel Rukeyser, Roberto Bolaño, C.D. Wright, Jena Osman and Mark Nowak, among others, to investigate this approach to writing poems and using primary source material attempt our hand at writing our own.

In this class we will look at the revision process, our own and others. We will each take a poem we have already written through several “radical” revision exercises and see if we can’t evolve our ideas of revision as an act into revision as an extended practice, examine ego and ownership, and leave with new tools to engage our work with.

The title for this masterclass is lifted from the title of scholar Tina M. Campt’s insightful text on ways of listening closely to photography; it informs how we will attune ourselves to the “lower frequencies” of a photographic image so that we can register “‘felt sound[s]’–sound that, like a hum, resonates in and as vibration.” In this four-week collaborative space (my model for the workshop is a space of generating work and sharing it in communal generosity), we will explore the ways in which poets have recently engaged with personal, historical, and archival photographs: Ross Gay, Deborah Paradez, and Anthony Cody, to name a few, while simultaneously embarking on our own listening and entrance into/with images.

“Look at the world carefully.” That is one of the most common pieces of advice people give about how to be a better writer. But, what can that really mean? How do you train your gaze to look more closely, more carefully, and more imaginatively? In this generative workshop, we will try some strategies toward building more brightly observant poems. Poems that might be called microscopic, or telescopic, deeply felt and keenly observed. Hopefully you’ll walk away from our time together with strategies you will be able to use over and over again.

This generative workshop focuses on the art of reading and writing haibun, a hybrid Japanese form which includes prose and haiku. We will explore classic and contemporary examples by writers including Matsuo Basho, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Mark Nowak and Tamiko Beyer. Through guided prompts, we will try our hand at composing our own haibun.

In this craft session, we will look at pieces which address everyday aggressions: micro and macro. Some of these may be pieces which are in dialogue with another piece of creative writing, or in response to a personal or social incident in real life. What does intentional writing as an act of resistance, of rectifying the record, of reclaiming injustice look like?

For so long, we’ve been taught to avoid personification of the non-human as a sentimental pitfall, borne of the Romantics and, most iconically, Wordsworth wandering “lonely as a cloud,” devoid of social or biological tethers. But holding ourselves apart might not be doing us — or non-human beings — any kind of service. Recent science shows us all kinds of communication between plants and animals. What if we DO let clouds, elk, lupine speak? What if we imagine the inner minds of plants and birds and allow them agency? Can that expand empathy and perhaps care? Is there a way to do so ethically, filled with nuanced awareness of the science and life history of the non-human, and with an eco-justice mind? Can we invite and allow feelings without smearing ourselves across other species? We’ll read examples, jump-start ourselves with writing exercises, and discuss the opportunities and dangers of both embracing and avoiding personification.

Every great poem understands its relationship to sentence structure thoroughly. Indeed, as Mary Kinzie notes, the line and the sentence are “the most important and interdependent of all the features of poetry.” Foundational to literary thought, the sentence comprises a set of words complete in itself. How a line break uses, distorts, and even subverts our more common contracts with language is essential to understanding how to read or write any poem. Through a series of writing exercises, this session offers strategies for how to radically play with our most familiar building blocks. We begin by appreciating what we already know and, bending it a little, relax into the kind of play that often proves supremely generative.

Charles Baudelaire coined the term “flâneur” to indicate a person who strolls around a city with no particular destination in mind, observing, ingesting all that is happening around them. Henry David Thoreau walked extensively taking note of trees, insects, flowers, the natural life of his countryside. Both writers weaved their observations into their poems and other writing. We’ll take our cue from them and go on a walk ’round the block, down the lane, and begin our own original compositions. Rain or shine.

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The lyric essay combines the density, muscle, and music of the poem with the expansiveness, narrative momentum, and overt desire to engage with information of the essay form. Tied to the original notion of an essay as an effort, a trying an attempt at making sense, its combined allegiances to the fragment and the whole, the actual and the imaginative, the image and the story, make it the perfect form for exploring and charting the landscapes—both exterior and interior—that make and mark our lives. Designed as an opportunity for poets craving a little space to move around, for essayists hungry to drill down to the core of language, or for any writer longing for a chance to experiment, investigate, and attempt, this generative workshop will serve as an introduction to the associative logic of the lyric essay and a chance to try your own hand at the form.

How do we define “interior” poetry? In many cases, such poems are assumed to be part of an actual sub-genre distinct from other streams of application and concern in contemporary poetry. We will examine this sub-genre and explore our own interiority in this class. A small anthology of poems by James Wright, Laura Kasischke, W.S. Merwin, Melissa Kwasny, Joseph Stroud and others will be provided.

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In this workshop, we will look at the turns and concluding or lines of poems and discuss how the writers establish a clear situation and then surprise the reader and open up the poem. We discuss and what makes interesting and compelling endings and answer the questions: What makes readers read it again? What makes a reader put a poem down and never revisit it? Then we’ll write in response to a prompt using some of the techniques we discuss. This workshop is designed to generate new work. You’ll leave with strategies you can use in your own work.

Stephane Mallarme once said that “A poem is not made of ideas; it’s made of words.” More recently, poet Jericho Brown said, “If you put language first, then you can discover your ideas. But if you’re thinking about your ideas first, then you’re going to be at the mercy of the language you already know instead of one you can figure out.” In this workshop, we’ll work from the level of words—considering etymologies and sound and where they can lead us and drawing on ideas in James Longenbach’s wonderful essay “The Medium of the English Language.” How can exploring the history of individual words, their overlapping sounds, their rhythms, their connotations lead us deeper into meaningful and surprising poems?

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In this workshop, we will focus on the revelation of something hidden (by the speaker, the family, group, or society) as the fulcrum by means of which a text becomes definitively a poem.

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 whole might become more than the sum of its parts. We’ll look at work by Matthea Harvey, Nikky Finney, Claudia Rankine, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Mary Ruefle, Terrance Hayes, and more. Bring your own pairings, and we’ll provide opportunity for conversation and critique.

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.

Given all the assumptions we tend to bring to biology, a consideration of the queerness in nature has drawn the attention of many poets. From Bruce Snider’s recent work, such as “After Reading the Wikipedia Entry on Homosexual Behavior in Moths” to Natalie Diaz’s gorgeous river verse in Postcolonial Love Poem, which as a collection argues for rethinking and decolonizing our relationships to nature, gender and desire prove dynamic scripts. Diaz writes: “A river is a body of water. It has a foot, an elbow, a mouth. It runs. It lies in a bed. It can make you good. It has a head. It remembers everything.” This eagerness on nature’s part to persist and the certainty the universe seems to have about impermanence is a profound dialogue to explore, particularly as we consider the stakes of identity in our own work. Together, we’ll explore the possibility of form as what takes shape between pressures (like crystal-forming molecules attempting to lattice their way to stability). Together, we’ll consider more contemporary poems that explore this terrain and walk away with a few considered drafts of your own.

Mary Ruefle says, “metaphor is not idle comparison, but an exchange of energy, an event.” Tony Hoagland says, “in every metaphor there is a tension between the forces of gravity and antigravity, between the marriage to realism and the rebellion of fantasy.” In this workshop, we’ll look at the energy exchanges in some great metaphors, and how they navigate the span from realism to fantasy. And we’ll explore writing and honing metaphors that help lead us deeper toward meaning and imagination through a series of poem exercises.

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