Poetry Master Class: Memory and Imagination

1/24/17 – 4/11/17 | Tuesday 6:00 – 9:00 pm

This class is an intensive opportunity for advanced poets to explore the relationships between memory, imagination and “autobiography” in their poetry. We live in an age of memoir, but in debates over the blurring of fiction and nonfiction poetry is rarely included; and yet, more than 40 years after the rise of “confessional” poetry, poets are still struggling with issues of poetic truth-telling and responsibility.

This class is for advanced poets who have identified that they are working the borders between poetry and autobiography; poets whose work circles and re-enters—at different points in time and often with a different “I”—a particular event and/or place; poets who are questioning the boundaries/relationships between emotional and literal truth, memory and imagination, person and persona in poems that have an autobiographical imperative.

This class is a combination of reading/discussion of essays, writing, and workshopping. We will also look at several elements of craft: the line and the sentence, the use of syntax, issues of poetic “opening” and “closure” and the magic and chaos of the creative process itself.

Please obtain After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography edited by Kate Sontag and David Graham (Graywolf Press: 2001). Copy fee of $5 payable to the teaching artist.