Saturdays, January 10, 24, 31 and February 7, 2026, 1:00PM - 3:00PM

Meetings will take place in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room, Room 205; limit 12 students. 

Twelve-year cancer survivor and prize-winning poet, Pamela Uschuk, will lead this four-week generative poetry workshop for people who have dealt in any way with a left-threatening disease. Whether it be as a patient, as a family member or as a friend. This is not the same class that she taught at the Poetry Center in 2024. Both materials and prompts are new. The moment a person receives the diagnosis of cancer or any life-threatening disease such as ALS, Parkinsons, MS, etc. the world stops for that person. There is a huge silence. Diagnosis changes forever the life of that person as well as every relative and friend of that person. No one is untouched. That diagnosis is ultimately humbling, sometimes enlightening and very often terrifying. Not only the patient, but friends, spouses and relatives of that person are forced to face his/her/their own fear of death. And, they have to deal with grief. How can one heal the body, the mind and psyche? How does one write about something so enormous that it seems often beyond the imagination? In this generative poetry writing intensive, we will look at how other writers like Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Joy Harjo, Meena Alexander, Audre Lorde, Mary Tall Mountain, Carolyn Kizer, Marilyn Hacker, Richard Siken, Anne Sexton, Lucille Clifton, Rainy Dawn Ortiz and others have written about their own diagnoses and dire illnesses. This workshop is open to everyone. Participants will receive writing prompts, will have time to write and share their work with other participants.

Saturday, January 10, 2026, 10:00AM - 12:00PM

Meeting will take place in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room, Room 205; limit 12 students. 

Poets and other writers often express that we know a piece has succeeded when it is genuinely surprising. Sometimes we are pointing to formal or narrative surprise but, just as often, the surprise comes from the writing’s disclosure of something that the writer themself did not yet know (or no longer knew). Poetry, that is, is a way of accessing and giving form to the unconscious, to the parts of ourselves we have yet to fully encounter. This generative workshop will ask participants to experiment with techniques for talking to what is hidden in us, somehow ahead of us. Please arrive with something (a diary entry, an old poem of yours, a photograph…) that represents, to you, a younger version of yourself.

Wednesday, January 14, 2026, 5:00PM - 7:00PM 

Meeting will take place in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room, Room 205; limit 12 students. 

This is a poetry workshop about subverting expectations, breaking patterns, and doing too much. How do we write poems that crack through the haze of decorum? How do we say it like it is, but without reproducing cliches? How do we render emotional intensity in our craft, not just our content? That is: how do poets break rules in a way that works? In this workshop, we will look at several poems that make audacious moves, swing big, and go a little overboard, in search of the ways each of us might try shaking up our own poetic habits. We'll engage with some generative exercises and discuss what it means to get a little braver and weirder in our writing.

Wednesday, January 28, 2026, 5:00PM - 7:00PM 

Meeting will take place in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room, Room 205; limit 12 students. 

Midrash is a Hebrew word meaning "seek" or "investigate," originally referring to how ancient rabbis re-told biblical stories, spinning them so they would be meaningful to their own time and place.  There has been a resurgence of the form in our time.  In this workshop, writers have the opportunity to find new meanings in old stories.  We laugh a lot doing this exercise, and sometimes we cry.  We always make unpredictable discoveries.

Saturdays, February 7, 14, 21, and 28, 2026, 10:00AM - 12:00PM

Meetings will take place in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room, Room 205; limit 12 students. 

A well-chosen moment can hold everything – emotion, meaning, resonance. —Esme Wang. In this generative workshop, we’ll take on various approaches to the evolving form of micro memoir.  Part prose poem, part self-portraiture, part memoir, this genre takes on the construction of the self in fragments against the backdrop of space and time. We'll read works and explore various approaches by Lia Purpura, Richard Siken, Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Karen Brennan, and Loisa Fenicell, among others. Expect to write from and out of the shimmering objects of childhood (these, as poet Derek Mahon describes, "hold entire worlds") and the indelible moments of personal story, which we’ll render and tiny and jewel-like on a revolving stage of compression and elision.  Come ready to experiment and imagine. Materials provided.

Wednesday, March 25, 2026, 5:00PM - 7:00PM

Meeting will take place in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room, Room 205; limit 12 students.

In this class, we will explore the history of two literary forms, emanating from different parts of the world: the sonnet and the ghazal. We will discuss their rules and evolution through the ages, and, in the ghazal’s case, across languages. We will read ghazals by Shadab Zeest Hashmi, Agha Shahid Ali, and Mimi Khalvati, and sonnets by Terrance Hayes, Hieu Minh Nguyen, and Carl Phillips. We will ask: What makes a sonnet a sonnet? What makes a ghazal a ghazal? How can the constraint of form liberate us, allowing for creative poetic leaps?

Saturdays, April 4, 11, 18, and 25, 2026, 10:00AM - 12:00PM

Meetings will take place in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room, Room 205; limit 12 students.

This class is a generative writing workshop that will proceed from readings of several of the prominent Beat Poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Phillip Whalen, Joanne Kyger, Bob Kaufman, and Diane DiPrima. We read to understand how they conceived poetry, its possible methods, and its mission. We include brief meditation periods because the poets were deeply involved with Zen Buddhism, and through mindful contemplation we will come to write. The writing in the class will be new writing, begun after reading and meditation, in ways students may find new to their practice, and compelling for their future. Each class will include time for conversations about what students have created during the class. 

All poems we read will be provided by the Instructor. Bring paper and a writing instrument. We anticipate writing students, but the course is also open to artists interested in the Beat movement, who may wish to draw or sketch during the course.