In this course, students explore the following forms: sonnet, sestina, pantoum, villanelle, haiku, epistle, elegy, light verse, visual poem, exquisite corpse, concrete poem and “found” poem. Students will also create chapbooks of their work, using reproductions of their own artwork for the covers.

Star Black’s most recent collection of poems is Velleity’s Shade, and her handmade books were recently displayed in the exhibit “The Collaged Accordion” at the Center for Book Arts. She has taught at Stony Brook Southampton and the New School.

In this workshop, students write poems out of the overlappings of poetry and music, among other art forms, and look at the work of Ken Nordine, Woody Guthrie, Lewis Carroll, William Burroughs and others. Special attention is given to hip-hop and rhyming.

Paul Barman is a lyricist whose critically acclaimed albums include Thought Balloon Mushroom Cloud, which has been called “the Finnegans Wake of hip-hop.” He has taught at the Banks Street College of Education and lectured at Columbia and Brown Universities.

Poets and artists have long turned to the modern cartoon strip as a source for innovation. In this workshop, students work collaboratively and create comics and poems based on examples from writers and artists associated with the New York School, the Four Horsemen and Surrealism.

Paolo Javier is the current Queens Poet Laureate and the author of the time at the end of this writing, among other poetry books. He has taught at the University of Miami and co-edits the press 2nd Ave Poetry.

Class participants work with forms (sentence, found text, the list), themes (place, history, letter writing) and the making of images that sit near the texts. Authors and artists to be discussed include Juliana Spahr & Candace Ah Nee, Susan Howe, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cecilia Vicuña and Walid Raad/The Atlas Group. A digital camera (which can be a disposable model) is needed.

Jill Magi is the author of the text-image hybrid book Threads, and she runs Sona Books, a small chapbook press.

In this workshop, students learn to see every good poem as a toolbox for the creation of a new poem. The class will read the work of Harryette Mullen, Frank Bidart and others, whose poetry serves both as models and as materia poetica to be cannibalized—mining these sources for language and postures—for the making of lyric poems.

Christopher Schmidt teaches at LaGuardia
Community College and is the author of the
poetry collection The Next in Line.

This hands-on workshop focuses on in-class writing rather than critiquing peer work. A specific assignment or process is explained, and then students get down to work. This structure offers a break from the usual writing class model in which time is usually spent talking about work rather than working. Participants incorporate exercises and assignments, leaving each class with a new creation.

Application Due: Friday, April 29, 2011

Dorianne Laux’s most recent collections are The Book of Men, Facts about the Moon, Awake, What We Carry and Smoke, and she is co-author of a handbook on writing, The Poet’s Companion. She teaches
poetry in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University and is founding faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program.

Kevin Young is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels and Dear Darkness, and editor of five others, including the Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing. He teaches at Emory University, where he is also the curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library.

Application Due: Friday, February 4, 2011

Winner of a MacArthur “genius” Award, Anne Carson is a celebrated poet and classicist who has collaborated with artist Robert Currie on performance works. She has taught at McGill, the University of Michigan and NYU.

Application Due: Friday, February 4, 2011

Winner of a MacArthur “genius” Award, Anne Carson is a celebrated poet and classicist who has collaborated with artist Robert Currie on performance works. She has taught at McGill, the University of Michigan and NYU.