Poets & Writers

Rules create order, and creating order is one of the great joys of writing a poem. Rules also restrict us, and it is our work as poets to disobey, transcend, question, and free ourselves. The best poems are part of a tradition. The best poets are also the most original. How do we reckon with these contradictions? How is it we sometimes feel we’ve forgotten how to write a poem? As poets dreaming about a future poem, or even a future book, how do we overcome the self-consciousness and great soul-risk of approaching the page?

In this three-session course, we will challenge various rules and concepts that are typically passed down to us in service to our creativity, and see if we can bend and break the rules to expand and explode our creativity beyond our own expectations, voices, and aesthetics.

We will explore clichés—not how to avoid them, but how to use them to our advantage. We will explore the gnarly adverb and redundant adjective—rather than cut these tendrils lest they dilute our work, we will aim to get away with more of them at just the right moment until the adjective or adverb is our star. We will consider poems of sentimentality and refuse to back away from love poem, prayer, and elegy, putting on the emotional pressure and counter-pressure to turn sentimental into scintillant. We will follow Emily Dickinson in making abstractions particular, felt, and accessible, rather than erasing them from our poems. We will think up everything that is not poetic and sneak those very iPhones and toilets into our poems. We will wreck le mot juste and turn lines into dangerous ledges. We will consider silence as wound and will.