No matter their faith or doubt, most poets feel summoned to explore the ways human lives relate to the spiritual. Through readings of contemporary poets with a range of spiritual outlooks and inquiries, workshop participants will focus on making new poems, seeking to discover spirit through the stuff of the world.

Rallying around Dean Young’s assertion "we are making birds not birdcages,” this class will examine the role of form in innovative and traditional poems, and explore the interplay of memory, language, and art in the creation of new work.

This class will examine recent work from literary magazines to see how other poets create texture and tension, with focus on students’ poems and on several writing exercises to steering toward new strategies and discoveries in making a poem.

Neil Shepard is the author of four books of poems, including This Far from the Source and (T)ravel/Un(T)ravel. A senior editor of Green Mountains Review and a founding member of the poetry-jazz ensemble PoJazz, he teaches in the low-residency MFA Writing Program at Wilkes University.

Poets House is thrilled to host a live recording of Person, Place, Thing, a radio show by Emmy Award-winning writer Randy Cohen, original writer of “The Ethicist” for New York Times Magazine, and featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith.

Poet and performer Tracie Morris presents an open seminar on the relationship between sound, onomonpoetics, and imagery, demonstrating that form is a continuum that incorporates both the avant-garde and conventional, rather than something that is “broken” by experimentation, a source rather than a rulebook for the making and presenting of living, resounding poems.

Award-winning and prolific poet Alice Notley leads an autobiographically-inspired discussion of the poetry talent – its rarity, mystery, and importance in the education and nurture of poets.

Presented as part of the Emerging Poets Fellowship public lecture series.

A panel discussion and reading in conjunction with the exhibition “A Painter and His Poets: The Art of George Schneeman,” the first major retrospective of the artist's collaborative paintings, collages, prints, and books

On view: Tuesday, April 22–Saturday, September 20

A new take on a Poets House tradition: An overnight of poetic and spiritual cleansing, with guided meditations and intuitive writing sessions, proprioceptive movement and acupuncture options, and other activities designed to clear and comfort the mind and body, and open up new space for creativity.