Join our young pocket-poets and other special guests for an afternoon of readings and fun! We invite you to bring a poem of your choice to share, or find one here at Poets House. A great after-school event for families and poetry lovers of all ages, and a festive culmination of our year-long work with local school children.
Hosted by Dave Johnson and Charles Waters.

Funding provided by Goldman Sachs

In this workshop, we will explore what it means to be a "bad bitch" in the context of writing poetry—whether that is writing outside the margins or cracking open a silence that needs to speak. What is the meaning of "badness" in the context of verse—to be fearless, subversive, transgressive, promiscuous, assertive, or unapologetic? Or is it a more quiet resistance to the status quo? Could it be a reflection of duende, a hand-to-hand combat with the inner artistic demon, a heightened awareness of death, earthiness, dirt, and a dash of the diabolical?

In Stew’s brilliant rock musical Passing Strange, the main character, inspired by ex-pat James Baldwin, embarks on a journey where he encounters Mr. Venus, a Berlin performance artist, who declares “What’s inside is just a lie! Culture is cosmetic..." The Young Man realizes that "What’s inside of each and every one of us … what we mistakenly call our thoughts, our feelings, and our dreams, have actually been put there by a system, therefore our minds have been invaded, conquered, and occupied."

Join us for a day-long celebration of John Berryman, in honor of the poet's centenary.

This is a workshop about writing poems from the post September 11th, post Madrid train bombing, post-Charlie Hebdo world. The Muse and the Banshee are both welcomed. We will be looking at both historical and contemporary poems—like those of Andy Young, Cynthia Hogue, Gregory Pardlo, Peter Covino, and Steve Fellner—and considering notions of Gaston Bachelard's "The Poetics of Space" and poem as a place for the imagination to dwell.

How can we create momentum across a series of poems while holding onto the original big idea? A linked sequence creates its own terms for existence, and those terms may be formal, rhetorical, metrical, emotional, or a combination—or something else! This workshop will engage in exercises designed to develop and sustain a serial poem. Possible course texts include readings from Alice Notley, Dawn Lundy Martin, Roland Barthes, and Rickey Laurentiis. Students will emerge from this workshop with a draft of a six-poem sequence.

Beginning with a look at a poem by Sterling Brown, this interactive craft lecture with 2014 Kingsley Tufts Award winner Afaa Michael Weaver will consider the challenges and rewards of using vernacular language, including the resulting identity processes and perceptions of both writer and reader.

Current Radcliffe fellow Renee Gladman, award-winning Guggenheim fellow Ben Lerner, and New York School legend Eileen Myles, all celebrated writers of both poetry and prose, discuss their experiments with and between forms as well as their work in editing and publishing transgenre works.

Please join soprano Sharon Harms and the musicians of Zentripetal (Lynn Bechtold, violin and Jennifer DeVore, cello) for an afternoon of poetry and music.

Join Charles Waters for a morning of humorous poetry that's off the page and off the wall. We’ll write comical poems together and act them out on stage.

Charles Waters is a children's poet, actor and educator who has performed in schools and universities across the country. His work has appeared in various textbooks and anthologies including National Geographic.