Welcome to the Poetry Kitchen, a home for poets and readers who are searching for thoughtful conversation and deep writing time. Every year I offer a variety of generative, revision, and manuscript classes aimed at developing participants' confidence and independence within a supportive community of fellow makers. Classes are affordable and are open to all.
THE FOLLOWING CLASS IS FULL . . . WAITLIST ONLY
A Visit with the Brothers Grimm: Using Fairy Tales to Generate and Revise Poems
I’ve been reading and rereading fairy tales since childhood, and over time I’ve come to see that these odd stories have had a persistent yet mysterious influence on both the substance of my poems and many of the ways in which I’ve taught myself to re-see and re-work early drafts. Among other things, fairy tales are intense lessons in the friction between the expected and the unexpected, the dramatic power of repetition, the surrealities of landscape, issues of class struggle and moral ambiguity, the precise delineation of detail, and much more. All of these elements can play a part in enhancing and startling your own early poem drafts.
In this two-day class we’ll focus on two tales from Jack Zipes’s edition of The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. We’ll begin each day with conversation about one of the stories, generate a new poem draft based on that conversation, and then return to the tale as a model for a series of early-stage revisions of that original draft. At the end of the weekend you will have a sheaf of new drafts to keep playing with on your own.
Date: November 7 and 8, each day 10 a.m.–2 p.m. ET, on Zoom
Cost: $150
Class size is limited to 12 participants.
Inservice teachers will receive 8 hours of professional development credit
THE FOLLOWING CLASS IS FULL . . . WAITLIST ONLY
Syntax as Spark: Poets Learning from Prose
One of the peculiarities of my trajectory as a poet is the extent to which I’ve been influenced by prose writers, especially the great psychological novelists of the nineteenth century and the high modernists of the twentieth.
I’ve pondered this for years, and what I’m beginning to see is that, in addition to the allure of character and drama, these books have been lessons in the power and individuality of a writer’s syntax.
How do novelists use syntax to explore sound, story, and emotion? And how can poets learn from them as we experiment with new poems?
In this two-day class we’ll explore excerpts from the works of George Eliot, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Henry Green and put them into conversation with poems by Yusef Komunyakaa, Hayden Carruth, Natalie Diaz, and others in order to consider the intersections of sound, sentence, line, and emotional resonance. Then we’ll use these conversations to jumpstart our own new drafts.
Date: July 25 and 26, each day 10 a.m.–2 p.m. ET, on Zoom
Cost: $150
Class size is limited to 12 participants.
Inservice teachers will receive 8 hours of professional development credit.
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