ROBIN BECKER
Poetry and Prosody: A Poetry Workshop
June 27 — July 2
9am—12N
Tuition: $600
Open to all

This is a workshop for poets interested in trying out a range of approaches, forms and styles. Each member of the group will generate a new poem (or poems) every day for discussion; together, we'll explore the poet's handling of line, metaphor, musical elements, syntax and word choice. We'll ask questions such as "What forms might suit this material?" and "How do we add lyrical/musical elements to this poem?" daily handouts will supplement class discussion. My aim is to create a supportive atmosphere in which we attempt the unfamiliar and surprise ourselves with the results.

BIOGRAPHY

The University of Pittsburgh Press published Domain of Perfect Affection, Robin Becker's sixth collection. Her other books include The Horse Fair, All-American Girl and Giacometti's Dog. Her poems appear in numerous anthologies and textbooks, including Making Literature Matter and Poetry: An Introduction. In 2002, The Frick Art & Historical Center (Pittsburgh) published a limited-edition fine art chapbook of her poems, Venetian Blue. Professor of English and Women's Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, she received the 2000 George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching. Other awards include a Bunting Fellowship, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Award, and a National Endowments for the Arts Fellowship. She regularly reviews for The American Poetry Review, and writes a column on contemporary poetry called "Field Notes" for the Women's Review of Books, where she serves as Contributing and Poetry Editor.

CATHERINE BOWMAN
Food, Sex, Work, Dreams: Poems of Everyday Life
July 11 — 16
9am—12N
Tuition: $600
Open to all

This is a class in generating new poems. Specifically we will focus on elements of our daily lives, the private and public spheres we inhabit with an emphasis on the sensory— food, sex, work, dreams. If we think of writing poetry as an act of discovery, a deeper way of seeing, then perhaps our lives are filled with undiscovered realms, hidden nuances and understandings waiting to be revealed to us by exploring what is most familiar. There will be daily writing exercises on the topic of everyday life, optional take home assignments, readings from a packet of poems that I provide, and group discussions of the poems you write during the week.

BIOGRAPHY

Catherine Bowman is the author of four collections of poetry: Notarikon, The Plath Cabinet, Rock Farm and 1-800-HOT-RIBS. She is editor of Word of Mouth, an anthology of poems by poets she has reviewed and featured on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." Her poems have appeared in six editions of Best American Poetry as well as many literary magazines and journals, including The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares and Crazyhorse. Her writing has been awarded the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for Poetry, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She is the Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry and former director of the Creative Writing Program at Indiana University.

HENRI COLE
Poetry Workshop
June 27 — July 2
9am—1pm
Tuition: $725
Intermediate to Advanced

This class will include exercises in classical lyric genres: the aubade, the nocturne, the erotic, the ekphrastic, the pastoral, the elegy, the prayer, the self-portrait, the travelogue, the apology, the apostrophe, the birth poem, etc. Poems by participants will be discussed in a "workshop" format with attention to the process of revision.

For contemplation: "I believe the teacher's work should be largely negative. He can't put the gift into you, but if he finds it there, he can try to keep it from going in an obviously wrong direction. We can learn how not to write, but this is a discipline that does not simply concern writing itself but concerns the whole intellectual life. A mind cleared of false emotion and false sentiment and egocentricity is going to have at least those road-blocks removed from its path... Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look. The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn't require his attention." —from Mystery and Manners, by Flannery O'Connor

BIOGRAPHY

Henri Cole has published seven collections of poetry, including Middle Earth, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and Blackbird and Wolf, which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has received many awards for his work, including the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His selected poems, Pierce the Skin, was recently published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. He lives in Boston.

MARTHA COLLINS
Poetry Workshop
August 8 — 13
9am—12N
Tuition: $600
Open to all

This workshop will offer a potpourri of writing strategies, which participants may find useful both during and after the workshop. Through the reading of published poems and the writing of daily exercises, we will explore various ways of thinking about poetic form and syntax, and of expanding the content and vision of poems. Participants should leave the workshop with the beginnings of at least four new poems, some of which we will discuss in class, as well as starting points for other poems. Please bring 11 copies of one poem for reading and brief discussion at the beginning of the workshop, and 11 copies of another for possible discussion later in the week.

BIOGRAPHY

Martha Collins is the author of the book-length poem Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006), which won an Anisfield-Wolf Award and was one of the New York Public Library's "25 Books to Remember from 2006." Other awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, three Pushcart Prizes, and a Lannan Residency Grant. She has also published four collections of poems, two chapbooks, and two collections of cotranslations of Vietnamese poetry. The founder of the creative writing program at UMass-Boston, she is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and the Oberlin College Press. In spring 2010 she will serve as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell University.

CORNELIUS EADY
Poetry Workshop
July 11 — 16
1pm—4pm
Tuition: $600
Open to all

Reading a poem answers a basic question: what does a poet know, and how, through the act of writing the poem, do they hope to let us, the reader, in on it? Through our week together, in workshop, exercises, and close reading of other poets, we will find various ways of answering that question.

For our first meeting, please bring copies of a short poem by one of your favorite poets you wish to share, as well as copies of your own poems (2 pages max.) to be workshopped.

BIOGRAPHY

Poet/Playwright Cornelius Eady is the author of several poetry collections: Kartunes; Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; You Don't Miss Your Water; The Autobiography of a Jukebox; Brutal Imagination; and most recently, Hardheaded Weather (Putnam, 2008). His awards include Fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Traveling Scholarship, and The Prairie Schooner Strousse Award. His work appears in many journals, magazines, and the anthologies Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep, In Search of Color Everywhere, and The Vintage Anthology of African American Poetry, (1750-2000). He is co-founder of Cave Canem, and is currently Associate Professor in English at The University of Notre Dame.

DAISY FRIED
Poetry Workshop
August 1 — 6
9am—12N
Tuition: $600
Intermediate

Participants will present poems-in-progress for rigorous and supportive mutual critique. This workshop assumes that participants are excited by and committed to revision, and that there are no best schools of poetry, but only individual poems finding their own best form according to each poem's internal logic. Also, that the following qualities are often worthwhile in a poem: story-telling techniques, rich ambiguity, humor and irony as a way of getting to serious matter, the yoking of disparate dictions, the coincidence of the messy and the elegant. Poets who like to put as much real world as possible, in all its texture and surprise, into their poems, may especially value this workshop. Each participant will have at least four poems workshopped during the week.

Bring 11 copies of one poem to the first class. For those who want to generate new work outside of class during the week, optional poetry prompts will be offered.

BIOGRAPHY

Daisy Fried is the author of two books of poems, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (University of Pittsburgh, 2006), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and one of Library Journal's 10 Best Poetry Books of 2006, and She Didn't Mean to Do It, which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Award. For her poetry, she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the Cohen Award from Ploughshares and a Pew Fellowship. She reviews books of poetry for The New York Times and Poetry, and was awarded Poetry magazine's Editor's Prize for a Feature Essay for "Sing, God-Awful Muse," on reading Paradise Lost and the Nipple Nazi of Northampton. She taught creative writing recently as the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College, and at Villanova University.

KEVIN GOODAN
Landscapes Outside & the Landscape Within: A Poetry Workshop
July 4 — 9
9am—12N
Tuition: $600
Open to all

In this workshop, we will engage with the environment around us in order to access that "place" that resides in us from where poetry is born. There will be exercises and readings, and daily critiques of one poem from each student in the class.

BIOGRAPHY

Kevin Goodan's first book of poems, In the Ghosthouse Acquainted, was published by Alice James Books in 2004 and chosen for the 2005 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Winter Tenor, a second book of poems, was published in 2009. He has taught Creative Writing at the University of Connecticut, Wesleyan University, and is currently Assistant Professor at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho.

KIMIKO HAHN
Poetry Workshop: Blocks vs. Building Blocks
June 13 — 18
9am—12N
Tuition: $600
Open to all

It's pretty easy to find oneself blocked by frustration and/or to imitate one's successes—which of course blocks development. This is true for the published writer as much as it is true for someone who is just starting out. Thirty minutes of the first three sessions will be dedicated to close readings from an anthology (Conversation Pieces, Kurt Brown & harold Schechter, eds.); through these, we'll find ways to give ourselves assignments with the aim of moving past or avoiding developmental blocks. The workshop part of the class will be dedicated to holding a draft and seeing where the source of the poem might be. We will find ways to offer criticism without destroying the "magic" of the draft. For the first day, bring a 'polished' poem so we can hear your poetic voice. From then on, it's all new.

BIOGRAPHY

Kimiko Hahn is the author of eight books of poems, including: Earshot, which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award; The Unbearable Heart, which received an American Book Award; The Narrow Road to the Interior, whose title was stolen from Basho's famous poetic journal; a chapbook titled A Field Guide to the Intractable (Small Anchor, 2009); and, most recently, Toxic Flora (W.W. Norton, 2010). She is a recipient of The Shelley Memorial Prize, the PEN/Voelcker Award and a Lila Wallace'Reader's Digest Writers' Award as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program at Queens College, The City University of New York.

TERRANCE HAYES
Reading to Write: A Poetry Workshop
July 25 — 30
9am—12N
Tuition: $600
Open to all

This workshop will explore the ways "reading to write" can lead to new poems and new revisions of stalled poems. During the week we will look at how an assortment of poems imitate and are in conversation with other poems and other forms (music, film, journalism) and generate our own inventive imitations. Participants should bring 11 copies of two poems-in-progress. There will be opportunities to workshop previously written poems as well as the poems you write during the week.

BIOGRAPHY

Terrance Hayes is the author of four collections of poetry: Muscular Music, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Hip Logic, which won the National Poetry Series award; Wind in a Box; and most recently Lighthead (Penguin, 2010). He has been the recipient of many honors and awards, including a Whiting Writers' Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Best American Poetry selection, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University.

MARIE HOWE
Breaking Through: A Poetry Workshop for Experienced Writers
August 15 — 20
9am—1pm
Tuition: $725
Open only to students who have not previously studied with Marie

I'm interested in generating new work that breaks through the barriers of style we might not be aware of, barriers of syntax, tone, diction, subject matter, music, etc. We'll write together on paper and out loud and share our work without the usual critique. We'll read poems that might help us break out of patterns that are holding us back. My aim is to provide some strategies that might help us make new channels within ourselves so that new poems will have a place to travel through, out and into the world. Bring a fresh notebook and one or two books you love. You might also bring a few poems you've already written if you're prepared to make them new. The class will concern itself with breaking out of habits: the very new.

BIOGRAPHY

Marie Howe was a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in 1983. Her newest book of poems is The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (WW Norton). She is also the author of the collections What the Living Do and The Good Thief, winner of the 1988 National Poetry Series award. She's received grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Bunting Institute. With Michael Klein, she edited an anthology, In the Company of my Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and NYU.

MARIE HOWE AND MARK ADAMS
Receptivity and the Living World/Word
A weekend on the Cape with poet Marie Howe and cartographer/painter Mark Adams
June 12 — 13
9am—1pm
Tuition: $295
Open to all

We want to dedicate this weekend to cultivating the art of being present in a journey through the specific world of Provincetown's dunes, forest and beaches, bringing together the arts of writing and drawing in response to the natural world. You do not need to know how to draw and you don't need to be an experienced poet to come along on this journey—you only need to want to walk through the forest, the sand and maybe a little bit of water, and be receptive to new possibilities. We'll write in relation to what we hear and touch and smell and taste and see. We'll learn drawing techniques adapted to outdoor field settings (such as blind contour and gesture drawings, drawing with ink and brush, and watercolor wash drawing), keeping a journal for sketches and writing.

Bring an unlined sketchbook/journal 9x12 or larger and some bold pens and pencils (flair, felt tip, fine point sharpies, ebony pencils and any other writing/drawing materials you prefer). Additional materials will be provided. Be prepared for the full range of June weather.

BIOGRAPHY

Marie Howe was a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in 1983. Her newest book of poems is The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (WW Norton). She is also the author of the collections What the Living Do and The Good Thief, winner of the 1988 National Poetry Series award. She's received grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Bunting Institute. With Michael Klein, she edited an anthology, In the Company of my Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and NYU.

Mark Adams studied drawing, scientific illustration, ecology, and landscape architecture at the University of California, Berkeley and California College of the Arts. He has worked as a cartographer with the National Park Service on Cape Cod since 1992. A painter and videographer, he shows his work at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown and elsewhere in New England, and teaches at the Provincetown Art Association Museum School, Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill and for the Provincetown High School Academy Mentor Program.

MAJOR JACKSON
Doorways: A Poetry Workshop
July 4 — 9
9am—12N
Tuition: $600
Open to all

To write poetry is to engage in a life-long journey of honing one's skills in attuning life to the basic workings of language. It is a kind of spiritual practice that requires a wild discipline. The task is to uncover the joys of making. In this poetry workshop, we will tap into what we collectively know about how poems function and offer feedback on how to enrich a poem's ability to say what has not been said before.

Bring to class three, recently written poems and a list of your favorite devices and techniques in writing poetry. We will communally share our "tricks" of the trade, our enthusiasm, and our critical eye with the best intentions of helping each other grow in the art.

BIOGRAPHY

Major Jackson is the author of two collections of poetry: Hoops (Norton, 2006), a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literature — Poetry, and Leaving Saturn, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His third volume of poetry, Holding Company, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, and was a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. The Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at the University of Vermont, he is also a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.

FRED MARCHANT
Doors Wide Open: The Collage Poem
June 13 — 18
1pm—4pm
Tuition: $600
Open to all

What goes into making a genuinely expressive collage in poetry? How does mere assemblage become transformed into something revelatory and meaningful? In this workshop we will write new poems, deliberately working with the principles of collage as they apply to poetry: juxtaposition, disjunction, fragmentation, opacity, and negative space. We'll explore the poetic potential found in broken, elliptical, and/or non'linear narrative. We will also work with found language, randomness, and accident. Our goal will be to make new poems that are wide open to the world and whatever wells up from within.

Please bring to the first meeting 11 copies of a poem of yours that has within it some element(s) of collage.

BIOGRAPHY

Fred Marchant is the author of four poetry collections. His most recent book, The Looking House (Graywolf, 2009) was selected by the Barnes and Noble Review as one of the five best books of poetry in 2009. He is also the editor of Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford 1937-1947 (Graywolf , 2008), and co-translator, with Nguyen Ba Chung, of From a Corner of My Yard, by Vietnamese poet Tran Dang Khoa. Director of the Suffolk University Poetry Center, he is a 2009 co-recipient of the May Sarton Award from the New England Poetry Club.

CLEOPATRA MATHIS
Tension and Urgency in your Poems
June 12 — 13
9am—1pm
Tuition: $295
Open to all

When a poem seems flat and predictable in its subject or emotional progression, it is often that the argument of the poem is not compelling or lacks complexity. To convince, the poem must build in tension, taking on momentum as it moves along. In this weekend workshop, we will examine poems for their often bizarre logic, the unexpected moves and leaps that enhance tension and make the poem memorable. We'll look at poems that accomplish this sense of urgency in a variety of ways, as well as identify the possibilities in your own work.

Please bring two poems to the workshop with the intention of focusing on these goals.

BIOGRAPHY

Cleopatra Mathis's sixth book of poems, White Sea, was published by Sarabande Books in 2005. Various prizes for her work include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry, the Peter Lavin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Robert Frost Award, and two Pushcart Prizes. Most recently she was awarded a residency at the Dora Maar House in France. Since 1982 she has taught at Dartmouth College, where she directs the creative writing program. A 1981-82 Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, she serves on the Work Center's Writing Committee.

GAIL MAZUR
Poetry Writing and Revision
July 25 — 30
9am—12N
Tuition: $600
Open to all

In this workshop, we will read and write poems. Discussion will cover at least one poem you bring and poems that are written during the week. We will look at how a poem is built, and we'll work on revision, re-building, talking about how the move is made from initial impulses, ideas, language, to the poem that does everything it can. Participants will work hard, surprise themselves, and go home with poems and poems to work on. Please bring 11 copies of 3 poems of your own, and 11 copies of a favorite poem by someone else.

BIOGRAPHY

Gail Mazur is author of five collections of poetry, including They Can't Take That Away from Me, finalist for the National Book Award, and Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her sixth collection, The Age, is forthcoming. She is Distinguished Writer in Residence in the Graduate Writing Program of Emerson College and was the 2009 Fellow in Poetry at the Radcliffe Institute.

MICHAEL MORSE
Lost and Found: Reading and Writing the Elegy
June 12 — 13
9am—1pm
Tuition: $295
Open to all

The elegy offers one of poetry's most appealing consolations: it can transform loss—and even the threat of loss—into an artful presence. Our sessions will explore how reading and elegiac writing can help us reflect on the lives we've led (and will lead) as we navigate absence. Expect a moving and invigorating workshop— one that isn't afraid to laugh, either—as we write poems together and read a wide range of classic and contemporary poetic voices as models. You needn't have ever written a poem before; we'll focus on work generated in our sessions together.

BIOGRAPHY

Michael Morse teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York and has taught at The University of Iowa, the City University of New York, and The New School University. His poems have been published in various journals, including A Public Space, Field, The Iowa Review, The Literary Review, Ploughshares, and Tin House, and in the anthologies Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn and Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama's First 100 Days (University of Iowa Press, 2010). Honors include the Charles Angoff Award and fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, the Millay Colony, the Ucross Foundation, Ledig House, Vermont Studio Center, and the Willard Espy Literary Foundation.

GREGORY ORR
Writing from Your Threshold
June 20 — 25
1pm—4pm
Tuition: $600
Open to all

Some of the most engaging and significant poems, for readers and writers, come into being when the poet has positioned himself or herself on the threshold, that place where the disorder of experience, emotion, or memory meets the primordial ordering powers of poetry. In a series of exercises, we'll work to discover the nature of our own personal threshold and explore the gratifications of writing from that dynamic location. Please email two poems to FAWC by Friday, June 11. I will send advance reading along with a writing assignment to prepare for the work we will accomplish together.

BIOGRAPHY

Gregory Orr is the author of ten collections of poetry, the most recent of which are two book-length lyric sequences, How Beautiful the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) and Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved. He is also the author of a memoir, The Blessing, and Poetry as Survival, about the survival function of lyric poetry. His recent essay about his work as a civil rights volunteer in the Deep South in 1965, "Return to Hayneville," was reprinted in all three annual prose anthologies (The Best American Essays 2009, The Best Creative Nonfiction 2009, and The Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses). His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a Professor of English at the University of Virginia, where he was the founder and first director of its MFA Program in Writing.

ALICIA OSTRIKER
The Poet and the World
August 1 — 6
9am—12N
Tuition: $600
Open to all

How do our lives connect with the world? What do we care about beyond ourselves? "There is a form in all things (and in our experience) which the poet can discover and reveal," said Denise Levertov. "Barn burned down," says Basho. "Now we can see the moon." We'll find out. This will not be a workshop in which we need to produce finished poems, but one in which we discover new possibilities. There will be readings, daily exercises and several take home assignments. Expect to be surprised by yourself and others. Please bring a copy of one of your own poems, and a poem you love by someone else, of whatever period, that bring the poet and the world beyond the self together.

BIOGRAPHY

Alicia Ostriker has published twelve volumes of poetry, most recently No Heaven and The Book of Seventy, both from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her antiwar poem sequence The Mother/ Child Papers, originally published in 1980, has just been reprinted. Twice a National Book Award finalist, Ostriker has also received awards from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco Poetry Center, and the Paterson Poetry Center, among others. Her critical work includes Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women's Poetry in America and other books on poetry and on the Bible. She currently teaches in the Low-Residency Poetry MFA Program of Drew University.

MARIE PONSOT
Poetry Workshop
August 15 — 20
9am—1pm
Tuition: $725
Open to all

This workshop will focus on the reading and writing of poetry. Through close reading of student work, we will discuss the broader issues of form, style and structure, as well as more specific issues of craft such as line, rhythm, and metaphor. We will use the workshop participants' poems as springboards for discussion.

Please bring 11 copies of 4 or 5 of your poems to the Sunday evening orientation.

BIOGRAPHY

Marie Ponsot has published numerous works, including Springing; The Bird Catcher, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Green Dark; Admit Impediment; and True Minds. Her most recent collection of poems is titled Easy (Knopf, 2009). A translator of books from the French, she has taught in graduate programs at Queens College, Beijing United University, the Poetry Center of the YMHA, New York University and Columbia University. Her awards include a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, and the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association.

MARTHA RHODES
Look At It Again: A Poetry Workshop on Revision
July 18 — 23
9am—12N
Tuition: $600
Open to all

What good is revising a poem if we don't go at it with a real commitment to change, to allow our poems to travel from where they are to where they might go? And where might they go? That's the challenge. This workshop will investigate the revision process— from cosmetic editing to revision— that allows the poem to travel a different route down and across the page. We'll look at ways we can manipulate our material and investigate avenues that can bring our poems into richer, more dynamic terrain. This workshop is for the seasoned writer who is willing to do the intense work of imagining other possibilities for their poems. I'll present many different strategies for revision and walk each workshop participant through the steps it takes to bring a poem through multiple drafts. If you are a timid reviser, or feel stuck, or want to learn how to re-approach your work through the revision process, this workshop will be helpful.

BIOGRAPHY

Martha Rhodes is the author of three collections of poetry: At The Gate, Perfect Disappearance (winner of the Green Rose Prize), and Mother Quiet. Her poems have been widely published in such journals as Agni, American Poetry Review, Columbia, Fence, New England Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her work also appears in numerous anthologies, including Agni 30 Years, Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women, The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology, Last Call, and The KGB Bar Book of Poetry among others. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and is the director of Four Way Books in New York City.

VIJAY SESHADRI
Poetry Workshop: Pleasure Versus Pain
June 20 — 25
9am—12N
Tuition: $600
Open to all

Poetry creates pleasure in the mind of the reader as much by disenchantment as by enchantment, as much by stripping our illusions away as by reinforcing and enabling them. We will closely examine the musical and rhetorical dynamics by which this process is enacted, in both canonical poems and the poems of workshop members, and expose the ways in which the tensions, contradictions, dissonances, and dramas of experience are integrated into the wholistic representation that is the successful poem. We will do daily exercises, readings will be provided, and we will not be afraid of looking at things with an eye to their psychic sources.

BIOGRAPHY

Vijay Seshadri's collections of poems include The Long Meadow (Graywolf, 2004), winner of the James Laughlin Award, and Wild Kingdom. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Bomb, Boulevard, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and The New York Times Book Review, and in many anthologies, including Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets, Contours of the Heart, Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, and The Best American Poetry 1997, 2003, and 2006, and Best Creative Nonfiction 2008. He has received grants from the NY Foundation for the Arts, the NEA, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has been awarded The Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Long Poem Prize and the MacDowell Colony's Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement. He currently teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

ALAN SHAPIRO
Imitation: A Poetry Workshop
August 1 — 6
9am—1pm
Tuition: $725
Open to All

T. S. Eliot says that minor poets borrow, great poets steal. From classical antiquity to the present, poets have always learned their trade by imitating other poets. They have always pursued their individual talent by absorbing, assimilating and in some cases subverting the lessons of the traditions they inherit. In this class, we will read and imitate several poets, to be determined some time before the course begins. On the first day, we'll examine a representative poem or two by each of these poets and then the rest of the week we'll read and critique the imitations that you all write. We will read each poet closely, sympathetically, and predatorily. That is, we'll read like aspiring writers, looking for what we can steal. We'll attend to each poet's stylistic and formal idiosyncrasies, their techniques and habits, and then write poems that show whom we've read and how well we've read them. I'll hand out copies of the poems at orientation.

BIOGRAPHY

Alan Shapiro has written nine books of poetry, most recently Old War, winner of the 2009 Ambassador Book Award; Tantalus in Love; The Dead Alive and Busy, 2001 winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; and Song and Dance. The recipient of a writer's award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Shapiro has also published three books of prose, and a translation of Aeschylus's Oresteia, which Oxford University Press published in 2003. His new book of poems, Night of the Republic, will appear in 2011 from Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt, and his novel, Broadway Baby, will be published by Algonquin Books in 2011.

JOHN SKOYLES
Poetry Workshop
July 18 — 23
9am—12N
Tuition: $600
Open to all

The main focus of the class will be the workshop members' poetry, but I will distribute and discuss examples of strategies used by poets who exemplify as well as defy tradition. We will also look at craft essays, and a few examples of good poems that went "wrong." (Handouts provided). This course will address issues of syntax, sound, rhythm and line breaks, with the intention of helping each poem fulfill its ambition.

I would also like each student to bring a poem by a poet he/she admires, a poem that "makes you want to do what it does."

"Oh, for Christ's sake, one doesn't study poets! You read them, and think, That's marvelous, how is it done? Could I do it? and that's how you learn." -- Philip Larkin

We will begin each class with a brief discussion of that piece.

Since art involves risk-taking, I hope that the participants will push their work in new directions as a result of spending the week in this supportive and rigorous community.

Please bring 10 copies of two or three poems to the Sunday night orientation session, as well as the poem by another poet as described above. Revisions and new work will be welcomed during the week.

BIOGRAPHY

John Skoyles is the author of four books of poems, A Little Faith, Permanent Change, Definition of the Soul, and The Situation. He has also published a book of personal essays, Generous Strangers, and a memoir, Secret Frequencies: A New York Education. He has been awarded two Fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center and two individual fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as grants from the New York State and North Carolina Arts Councils. He teaches at Emerson College and serves as the poetry editor of Ploughshares.

JOHN YAU
The Daily Practice of Poetry
August 8 — 13
9am—12N
Tuition: $600
Advanced

The class will investigate various devices and frames (limited vocabulary, dreams, lies, rants, and imagined illnesses) that can be used to generate writing. There will be assignments and exercises that enable the writer to explore ways in which words, narratives, and meaning can be both put together and taken apart. For those willing to experiment and throw all assumptions about meaning and meaninglessness out the window, this class will be of interest to you. It isn't a class about inspiration, but about the daily practice of writing, and how one might find ways to have the strangeness of the world and the strangeness of language meet on the page. In each workshop, every writer's assignment will be discussed.

BIOGRAPHY

John Yau's recent books of poetry include Borrowed Love Poems, Ing Grish, and Paradiso Diaspora (Penguin, 2006). Other books include A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (Distributed Art Publishers, 2008), and a book of essays, The Passionate Spectator. He is the Arts Editor of the Brooklyn Rail (www.brooklynrail.org). His poems have appeared in many magazines including the American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, and Southern Review. Recent awards include being named a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government, and a Fellowship in Poetry from the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.