Poetry Workshops
Week 1 - Making a Better Poem Through Interrogation
John Hoppenthaler
Poetry students usually understand that part of the poetry-writing process – arguably the most important part – is revision. More often than not, however, you’re provided with little guidance as to how to interrogate a poem with vigor, honesty and resolve; and how to go about making the poem a more fully-realized piece of art. This workshop will suggest a less haphazard, more disciplined approach to revising poetry. Specific strategies will be revealed, and your poems will serve as textual examples. You are welcome to bring 15 copies of 1-2 of your own poems to discuss in class as time allows.
| About John Hoppenthaler John Hoppenthaler’s books of poetry are Lives of Water and Anticipate the Coming Reservoir. His poetry appears in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Christian Science Monitor, and Southern Review, as well as in many anthologies. For the cultural site Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, he edits “A Poetry Congeries” and curates the Guest Poetry Editor Feature. He teaches at East Carolina University. |
Week 2 - In the Studio: Writing, Revision and Play
Nicole Cooley
The aim of this class is to put play in the center of our writing practice– and to think deeply about revision as an act of writing. To that end, we will have fun workshopping your poems, as well as writing and reading from a range of sources. We’ll write collaborative poems, prose poems, one-line poems, and poems in form to explore how writing exercises can help lead us into subjects we might not otherwise discover. We’ll also talk about ephemera, archival sources, and found poems, as well as writing from our own personal histories. You are welcome to bring 15 copies of 1-2 of your own poems to discuss in class as time allows.
 | About Nicole Cooley Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans. Her most recent book of poems is Breach, to be published by LSU Press in April 2010, which focuses on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. She has published two other books of poems and a novel. She has been awarded the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, a "Discovery"/Nation Award, and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. She directs the new MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College-City University of New York. |
Week 3 - Places Everyone
Maggie Anderson
“I liked the place; I liked the idea of the place,” wrote Elizabeth Bishop in her poem “Santarem.” This course will consider the ways in which place and “the idea of place” help generate and focus poems. We will consider both real and imagined places; places we have been and places we may wish to be; places we know through history, current events, or literature; places of origin and places of destination. Using writings by participants as well as poems by other poets, we will explore together the ways in which we find our “places” in the world through writing them. Advance submissions may be sent to manders0@kent.edu by July 5, or you are welcome to bring 15 copies of 1-2 of your own poems to discuss in class as time allows.
 | About Maggie Anderson Maggie Anderson is the author of five books of poetry, including Windfall:New and Selected Poems and Cold Comfort. She is the editor of the poetry anthology, The Next of Us is About to Be Born, poems from the Wick Poetry Series, which she edited from 1992-2009. The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Anderson is the founding director of the Wick Poetry Center and Professor Emerita of English at Kent State University. |
Week 4 - It Matters Only You Are Singing: Poetry And the Art of Loss
Stephen Haven
This workshop will explore how the experience of loss can be shaped into art that avoids sentimentality and sings of the value of our lives. We will think of loss in its full range, from small domestic things to pets and individual people to larger forms of loss – entire communities, cultures, the planet itself. We will discuss published poems and give primary attention to your own poems. You are welcome to bring 15 copies of 1-2 of your poems to discuss in class as time allows.
 | About Stephen Haven Stephen Haven is the author of two books of poems, Dust and Bread and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks, and of the memoir The River Lock: One Boy’s Life along the Mohawk. His poems have appeared in many journals, including Salmagundi, Parnassus, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Literary Imagination, Image, and Crazyhorse. He is Director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Ashland University. |
Week 5 - Building Poetry From the Image Up
David Baker
This workshop will start with the image, a fundamental building block of poetry, and explore a progressive method for writing poems. Each day we’ll add a different element, turning images into metaphors, and metaphors into stories and ideas. Exercises and readings will be supplied each day, though our primary attention will be on our own poems, discussed in a workshop setting. Participants are invited (but not required) to send 2-3 poems before July 15 to David Baker, 329 Summit Street, Granville OH 43023, baker@denison.edu, or bring 15 copies of 1-2 of your poems to discuss in class as time.
 | About David Baker David Baker is author of a dozen books, including Never-Ending Birds (poetry) and the Radiant Lyre (essays). His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and Poetry, and has received awards from the Guggenheim and Mellon Foundations as well as the National Endowment for the Arts. He holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Poetry at Denison University and teaches also in the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. He is Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review. |
Week 6 - Having Fun (or Making Trouble) with Forms
Jim Daniels
While everyone knows about common forms such as the sonnet and haiku, there are many other interesting poetic forms out there. We will be looking at and trying out some of these other forms. Poets at all levels are welcome. We will be creating new work based on assignments to challenge both beginning and advanced poets. You may also bring 15 copies of 1-2 works-in-progress to the class. Please try to send 1-2 poems in advance to Jim Daniels, English Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213.
 | About Jim Daniels Jim Daniels is the author of thirteen poetry books, including Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry and From Milltown to Malltown (poems and photos, with Charlee Brodsky and Jane McCafferty). He has published three collections of fiction and written two produced screenplays. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He is the Thomas Stockman Baker Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. |
Week 6 - Advanced Poetry Workshop
Philip Terman
This workshop is for those who have serious engagement with the craft of writing poetry. We will workshop poems by each participant, and discuss all aspects of the art form. Our discussions will be dynamic and give you both concrete ideas on how to improve the work you submit, and the inspiration to continue your work.
 | About Philip Terman Philip Terman’s five collections of poems include The House of Sages, Book of the Unbroken Days, and, most recently, Rabbis of the Air. His poems and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry magazine, the Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, and Blood to Remember: American Poets Respond to the Holocaust. He has received the Sow’s Ear Chapbook Award, the Kenneth Patchen Award from Pig Iron Press, and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience. He is a co-director of the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival and teaches creative writing at Clarion University of Pennsylvania. |
Week 7 - Putting Sacred Spaces in a Poem
Todd Davis
We all come from some place, and those places mold our very lives, from our daily routines to our notions of the sacred to our relationships with other people and with the world that sustains us. In this workshop, we will focus on how places – what Zen Buddhists refer to as the world of ten thousand things or what Christians might call the incarnation as seen through creation – not only serve as a shaping forces in the content of a poem, but also as formal influences in the structuring of that poem. Participants may send 1-2 poems by August 1 to Todd Davis, 136 Park Forest Lane, Altoona, PA 16601, or bring 15 copies of 1-2 of your poems to discuss in class as time allows.
 | About Todd Davis Todd Davis teaches creative writing and environmental studies at Penn State University’s Altoona College. He is the winner of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, author of three books of poetry – Ripe, Some Heaven, and The Least of These – and co-editor of Making Poems. His poems have been published widely and have been featured by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac and by Ted Kooser in American Life in Poetry. |
Week 8 - Energize Your Poems: Using the Unconscious as a Springboard
Wendy Mnookin
Does writing always have to be a solitary act? Can we use group energy to break out of habitual ways of writing and discover new subjects and styles? In this workshop we will use free-writes and prompts from the instructor to generate language that we will share and expand upon before crafting our efforts into poems. The workshop gains energy as we examine poems that grow from this process. You are also welcome to bring 15 copies of 1-2 of your poems to discuss in class as time allows.
 | About Wendy Mnookin Wendy Mnookin’s most recent book, The Moon Makes Its Own Plea, was published in 2008. Her other books are What He Took, To Get Here, and Guenever Speaks, a collection of persona poems. Her poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and on Poetry Daily. Mnookin teaches poetry at Emerson College and at Grub Street, a non-profit writing program in Boston. |
Week 9 - Trusting the Language: Poetry, Memory, and Transformation
Ansie Baird
W.H. Auden said, “In order to be a poet, you must be in love with language.” This workshop examines how the precision of a particular word or words can make the difference between what is ordinary and what is astonishing. The music of your poems, the ordering of line breaks, opening and concluding words will be examined along with the shape of the poem on the page. A variety of poetic voices will be encouraged and examples from the work of other poets provided. Daily in-class exercises will help open the portals of memory and imagination. Optional ideas for overnight exploration will also be available. You are asked to come to the first class with 15 copies of 1-2 poems in progress. All levels of poetic experience are welcome.
 | About Ansie Baird Ansie Baird teaches at The Buffalo Seminary, is an editor for Earth's Daughters, has taught for Just Buffalo in their Writers In E ducation program, and participated in the Albright-Knox collaborative entitled “A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words.” Her work has been published in The Paris Review and other journals. Her book, In Advance Of All Parting, won the White Pine Press national poetry competition and was published by White Pine Press in 2009. |
