Wednesday, September 9, 2026, 5:30PM - 7:30PM

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

Poetry is an ancient form of expression that holds spiritual and existential depth, a medium to speak the “unutterable.” Yet it is a form of great intimacy, often spoken from the first-person and drawing heavily upon autobiographical events. How can the self grasp something beyond itself in poetry? The freedom and self-sufficiency of a poem is born out of a single human consciousness—yet the poet must abandon herself to dizzying array of dream-like realities, wedded with the external reality. Importantly, she must relinquish much of the social language familiar to her in communication, and “speak in the mask of the first person,” (Franz Wright). How can we appreciate the ancient prophetic act of poetry again, in which our own language feels unfamiliar to us, and from “somewhere else”? This seminar and generative workshop will enhance opportunities of writing outside of what we think we know, through embracing the fungibility of pronouns, I & Thou, addressee and addressed, veil and re-velation in poetry. We will look at poems by Ruth Stone, Louise Glück, Rumi and Goethe. We will appreciate poetry’s unutterable as a way to expand, and make more strange, the self—until the self might very well disappear.

Saturdays, November 7, 14, 21 & December 5, 2026, 1:00pm – 3:00pm

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

Poets in every culture have been obsessed with wings since time immemorial. This hands-on generative poetry writing intensive calls participants to learn from, listen to and observe our bird relatives in writing poems of all sorts, McArthur Genius Fellow poet and ornithologer, J. Drew Lanham calls himself “a bird brain” who carries his “feel guide” into the field to find joy, inspiration and community by being among the birds. He is but one poet we study whose work confronts contemporary issues and flies on transformational wings. Other poets whose work we discuss include Amy Tan, Peggy Shumaker, Derek Sheffield, Elizabeth Bradfield, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Joy Harjo, Sandra Alcosser, Sean Hill, Camille Dungy, Linda Hogan, Simmon Buntin, Ada Limon and many more. One class incorporates a bird walk near the Poetry Center and an opportunity to meet the instructor at Sweetwater Bird Refuge for an extracurricular bird walk and poetry writing session. Each session includes in-class and outside-the-class writing as well as poetry prompts. Pamela Uschuk will write critical comments on all poems turned in by participants.

Saturdays, November 14 & 21, 2026, 10:00am – 12:00pm

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

What happens when a poem makes you laugh and then immediately breaks your heart? This two-session workshop explores how poets use humor, wordplay, and levity to approach difficult subject matter—not as avoidance, but as craft. We'll examine poems that employ puns, jokes, rule-breaking, and playful dramatic structures to create emotional complexity and surprise, studying how comedy can disarm readers, build intimacy, or amplify poignancy through juxtaposition. Through close readings and generative exercises, participants will experiment with various forms of play in their own work, discovering how humor can be a tool for both courage and precision. Come ready to laugh, write, and take risks.

Wednesday, December 2, 2026, 5:30PM - 7:30PM

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

Paul Valéry once said, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned” which is a good late-night argument among friends, but not especially useful for poets who are trying to end a piece. Poems need some kind of resolution to reify the lines, stanzas, and trochees that precede the inevitable conclusion. In this session, we’re going to spend some time looking at the way writers such as James Baldwin, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Lucille Clifton, Jack Gilbert, and Robert Hayden shut things down in their work with an eye toward lifting their strategies for our own writing. The last part of the session will be interactive, so please bring a poem in progress with you to the session.

Saturday, December 5, 2026, 8:00am – 10:00am

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

“Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels,” explained Peter Johnson. A favorite of the French symbolists and contemporary poets alike, the prose poem is an enigmatic, hybrid creature that wields the techniques of poetry but foregoes its line breaks. The poet James Tate went as far as to suggest that its paragraphs could trick the reader "into glimpsing a little sliver of eternity." In the first half, we will read and study examples by Natalie Diaz, José Olivarez, Aracelis Girmay, and Robin Coste Lewis. In the second, we will turn to a writing exercise that will help us generate and share our own prose poems.