Class

Variations on a Theme: An 8-Week Generative Poetry Workshop

The Impressionist painter Claude Monet painted the waterlilies at his home at Giverny for thirty years, and while I'm sure they taught him about waterlilies, they must have also taught him something about his own artistic style. By keeping the subject matter the same, he had to focus on his materials, his paint and his brushstrokes, to create the differences between the paintings.

This class will apply the same theory to poetry. Students will choose one subject for the course and write a sequence of poems on that same subject. As a class, we'll discuss different strategies to "talk back" to our previous poems. We will look at examples from Ross Gay, Monica Youn, Jake Skeets, Nancy Eimers, Robert Hass, and Frank Bidart of this kind of generative revision, and we will share our poems in low-stakes workshop. Writers can expect to come away from the course with several new poems that could stand alone or form a sequence.

Please email [email protected] at least two to three weeks in advance if you have any accessibility requests for this class. PLEASE NOTE: the elevator in Open Book will be unavailable for use from July - August 2025 due to modernization. This class takes place in-person, at the Loft at Open Book. Please see the Loft’s website for the most up to date information about the Loft’s COVID policies.