Poets House offers a wide range of classes for experienced readers and writers of poetry as well as newcomers to the art. Our classes include master classes, open-enrollment poetry writing workshops, public seminars on poetry and other kinds of poetry-related courses. Please read on for more details.

Master Classes
Master Class with Marie Ponsot—February 27–28
Master Class with Marie Howe—May 22–23
Master Class with Robert Hass—May 30
Master Class with Quincy Troupe—June 5-6

Reading, Writing & Making: Open-Enrollment Seminars & Workshops
On Modern Poetry: Seminars with Michael Heller—February 20 & 27
Listening, Recording, Writing with Stacy Doris—March 13–14
Visual Poetry with Jen Bervin—March 24–April 28
The Elegy with Bhisham Bherwani—March 25–April 29

Ecopoetic Futures: Open-Enrollment Seminars & Workshops on Poetry & the Environment
Ecopoetics After Copenhagen with Jonathan Skinner—May 12, 14, 15
An Ethics Occurs at the Edge of What We Know with Brenda Hillman—May 29

Master Classes

Master Classes at Poets House offer advanced writers of poetry an opportunity to work intensively on their poems with some of the most respected poets of our time.

Application Guidelines: Submit three poems accompanied by a cover sheet that lists your name, address, email address and phone number; no names/addresses should appear on the poems themselves. Applications may be sent to: Poets House, Attn: Classes, 10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282, or, by email, to classes@poetshouse.org. Applications must arrive by the designated deadline.

Master Class with Marie Ponsot
Saturday, February 27, 1:00–5:00pm 
Sunday, February 28, 1:00–5:00pm
$390, space is limited
Application Deadline: Friday, February 12

Marie Ponsot's recent books include The Bird Catcher, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; Springing: New and Selected Poems; and Easy. She is a native New Yorker who has taught at Queens College, Beijing United University, New York University and Columbia University.

Master Class with Marie Howe
Please note new time:
Saturday, May 22, 1:00–5:00pm
Sunday, May 23, 1:00–5:00pm
$390, space is limited
Application Deadline: Friday, April 23

Marie Howe is the author of The Good Thief, which was a National Poetry Series winner selected by Margaret Atwood, What the Living Do and The Kingdom of Ordinary Time. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University and New York University.

Master Class with Robert Hass
Sunday, May 30, 12:00–4:00pm
$195, space is limited
Deadline: Friday, April 30

The recipient a MacArthur Fellowship, Robert Hass is the author of many books of poetry, including Time and Materials, which won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. As U.S. Poet Laureate (1995–1997), he founded River of Words, an organization that promotes environmental and arts education in affiliation with the Library of Congress Center for the Book. Hass's new volume The Apple Trees at Olema: Selected Poems & Essays, 1985–2009 as well as a collection of selected essays will be published this spring.

Master Class with Quincy Troupe
Saturday, June 5, 1:00–5:00pm
Sunday, June 6, 1:00–5:00pm
$390, space is limited
For registration information, call (212) 431-7920, ext. 2826.

Quincy Troupe is the author of seven volumes of poetry including The Architecture of Language and Transcircularities. In addition to chronicling his friendship with Miles Davis in Miles and Me, Troupe has recently published children's books on Magic Johnson and Stevie Wonder. A former professor at the College of Staten Island and the University of California, San Diego, he divides his time between New York and Guadeloupe.

Reading, Writing & Making: Open-Enrollment Seminars & Workshops

Open-enrollment seminars and workshops at Poets House are for both experienced and beginning poets and readers of poetry. No applications are needed. Pre-registration is required for some classes where noted. Tuition ranges from $7 for a public seminar to $310 for a six-week writing workshop.

Open Enrollment Weekend Seminars & Workshops

On Modern Poetry: Public Seminars with Michael Heller
In two round-table discussions, poet and critic Michael Heller explores major aspects of the origins and aesthetics of modern poetry. These seminars are a wonderful way for newcomers as well as poetry experts to map the broad and divergent landscape of modern American poetry.

The Foundations of Modern and Contemporary Poetry with Michael Heller
Saturday, February 20, 2:00–5:00pm
$10, $7 for students and seniors, free to Poets House Members; pre-registration is not required

Readings for this first session will include the poetry and prose of Whitman, Dickinson, Pound, Frost, Williams and Stevens, with reference to the intellectual and cultural environment in which modern poetry arose.

“No Ideas but in Things”: Developments, Diversities, Dispersions, Disavowals with Michael Heller
Saturday, February 27, 3:00–6:00pm
$10, $7 for students and seniors, free to Poets House Members

Readings for this session include Zukofsky, Oppen, Moore, Niedecker, Harlem Renaissance poets, Olson, Black Mountain and Beat Poetry. We will discuss traceries, inflections and influences of the early modernist poets on the poetry that came after, with some reflections on shape and form in contemporary poetry.

Michael Heller is a poet, essayist and critic. Among his many books are the poetry collections Eschaton, Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems and In the Builded Place as well as the memoir, Living Root. His most recent critical book is Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen. He taught for many years at New York University.

Listening, Recording, Writing with Stacy Doris
Saturday, March 13, 12:00–3:00pm
$10, $7 for students and seniors, free to Poets House Members

In this writing seminar, participants will strategize on techniques centered in sound recording and engineering—including acoustic attention and tension, mixing, multitracks, instrumentation, multiple takes, compression and sequencing—to chart new paths into poetry. The tonally vibrant span of lower Manhattan will be considered as a reverberant terrain for approaches to expanded resonances and fine tunings in poems.

Stacy Doris's books include Cheerleader's Guide to the World: Council Book; Knot; Conference; Paramour; and Kildare. She also writes books in French and has co-edited collections of new French poetry in translation. Her audio works include a feature-length creation for radio FranceCulture and, with Lisa Robertson, a series of recordings of 18th-century perfumes. She is on the Creative Writing faculty at San Francisco State University.

Six-Week Open Enrollment Workshops

Visual Poetry with Jen Bervin 
6 Wednesdays, March 24–April 28, 6:30–9:00pm
$310, pre-registration required; call (212) 431-7920 or email classes@poetshouse.org

The word poetry is derived from  poïesis, the ancient Greek word that means "to make." During this workshop, students will make poems and experiment with ephemeral modes, tactile methods, unusual scale, spaces and durations in order to create a more open field for poetic possibility. Selected visual poetry, conceptual art, concrete poetry and artists' books will be presented; binding and fabricating techniques will also be explored for their compositional potential. 

Jen Bervin, poet and visual artist, is the author of The Desert; Nets; A Non-Breaking Space; The Red Box; and Under What Is Not Under. Her work has been shown at The Walker Art Center, The Soap Factory in Minneapolis, The Wright Exhibition Space in Seattle and elsewhere.

The Elegy with Bhisham Bherwani
6 Thursdays, March 25–April 29, 6:30–9pm
$310, pre-registration required; call (212) 431-7920 or email classes@poetshouse.org

This workshop is for poets interested in composing elegies and exploring the elegiac mode in English and American poetry. Discussions will focus on elegies for friends, lovers, spouses, parents, grandparents, children, siblings, and public figures, and will extend as necessary to embrace other related modes and themes in poetry. The participants will compose new poems, revise poems, and examine a selection of elegies by Auden, Bishop, Gilbert, Hardy, Heaney, Hirsch, Lowell, Merwin, Milton, Ponsot, Shelley, Stevens, Tennyson, Walcott and Whitman, among others.

Bhisham Bherwani's poetry collection The Second Night of the Spirit was published in March 2009 by CavanKerry Press. He has taught Creative Writing at Hunter College.

Ecopoetic Futures:
Open-Enrollment Seminars & Workshops on Poetry & the Environment

These workshops and seminars are part of Ecopoetic Futures, a series of events held at Poets House this spring that examine poetry and the environment. No applications are needed. Pre-registration is required for some classes where noted.

Ecopoetics After Copenhagen with Jonathan Skinner

Poetry & Biodiversity: A Public Seminar with Jonathan Skinner
Wednesday, May 12, 7:00–9:00pm
$10, $7 for students and seniors, free to Poets House Members; pre-registration is not required

In recognition of the International Year of Biodiversity, this seminar with poet and ecocritic Jonathan Skinner looks at current poetics and cultures of biodiversity, including forest languages and invasive activity in disturbed ecosystems.

 

Poetry & Watersheds: A Public Seminar with Jonathan Skinner
Friday, May 14, 7:00–9:00pm
$10, $7 for students and seniors, free to Poets House Members; pre-registration is not required

Poet and ecocritic Jonathan Skinner examines how poets are responding to our relationship to water, taking into account emerging science, politics, and social and ecological inequities.

 

Urban Field Poetics: A Writing Workshop with Jonathan Skinner
Saturday, May 15, 1:00–5:00pm
$140, pre-registration required; call (212) 431-7920 or email classes@poetshouse.org

Building on the concerns uncovered in Skinner's two previous seminars, this workshop is an ecopoetics field audit that focuses on Poets House's location along the Hudson River and introduces site-based writing.

Jonathan Skinner's poetry collections include With Naked Foot and Political Cactus Poems. He edits the journal ecopoetics and writes ecocriticism on contemporary poetry and poetics. He also teaches in the Environmental Studies Program at Bates College.

An Ethics Occurs at the Edge / of What We Know: A Public Seminar with Brenda Hillman
Saturday, May 29, 1:00–3:00pm
$25, $20 for students and seniors, $15 to Poets House Members; pre-registration is not required

Author of Practical Water, among other poetry books, Brenda Hillman discusses poetry and activism, writing about the elements and ecopoetics, and the writing process in relation to political commitment and spiritual ideas.

Brenda Hillman has published eight collections of poetry, most recently, Practical Water and, co-edited with Patricia Dienstfrey, The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood. The Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California, Hillman is also a permanent faculty member of the Napa Valley Writers' Conference and of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. She is committed to non-violent activism as a member of the Code Pink Working Group in the San Francisco Bay Area.