6 Thursdays, April 12–May 24th (skipping May 10th), 6:00–8:30pm

From first draft to final draft, we need strategies for seeing the whole poem, both its full potential for content and its most satisfying form. Students will talk about strategies for the intense perception of the first draft as well as for “re-seeing” the poem, practicing the kind of deep revision that leads us to reconsider everything from word choice and vivid image to metaphoric subtext, grammatical pattern and inner music of the poem.

6 Wednesdays, April 11–May 16, 6:00–8:30PM

This workshop considers ways into your “memory palace,” with its stored treasure of objects and events. Students will be encouraged to create “from the heart to the breath to the line,” with attention to “how you sound.”

Hettie Jones is the author of twenty-three books for children and adults, including three poetry collections. Her first, Drive, won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber Award. Jones is on the faculties of the New School’s MFA Writing Program and the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center.

6 Saturdays, February 25–March 31, 11:30am–2:00pm

Which of us, in his ambitious moments, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose? (Baudelaire) The prose poem is a border genre particularly suited to tracing/guiding consciousness. This workshop will explore poetic possibilities while writing five works in prose and also reading poetry and poetics from some 20th century poetic movements—Imagism, Surrealism, Objectivism, Projective Verse and the New York School.

6 Thursdays, March 8–April 12, 6:00-8:30PM

In this workshop, students will explore both secular and sacred work informed by states of consciousness and rigors of form. Readings from Celan, Césaire, Cohen, Conrad, Donne, Plath, Rankine, Rimbaud and others, plus hymns, sutras, curses, and magic spells from Ancient Greece, contemporary Salem, Haiti, and Appalachia will inform the creative process. Our goal is to write poems with the torque and power of real magical acts.

6 Wednesdays, February 29–April 4, 6:00–8:30PM

This workshop will focus on incorporating autobiographical material into poetry with an emphasis on each participant’s writing. Students will read from a wide selection of poems and generate poems from notebooks, in-class writing, photographs and various other starting points that help evoke memories and spark the imagination.

A reading of Gertrude Stein’s poetic work follows the Stanzas in Meditation Panel, with panelists Logan Esdale, Susannah Hollister, Liesl Olson and Emily Setina, Stein archives curator Nancy Kuhl, and poets Paolo Javier, Rachel Levitsky, Ariana Reines, Joan Retallack, Christopher Schmidt, Laura

A reading by a diverse group of younger Dutch poets representing a cross-section of new poetic practices and dynamic literary theory.

With Pieter Boskma, Hélène Gelèns, Erik Jan Harmens, Lucas Hirsch, John Schoorl and Joost Zwagerman, introduced by Wayne Miller.

Part of the The New York To Pittsburgh And Back Dutch Poetry Tour