Using a poetic form to write a poem can feel like a mysterious, challenging experience. But form can also serve as a tool of cultural, historical, political and personal resistance and as a mode of empowerment. How can we learn to use these tools in our favor, building powerful, textured poems? What are we being called upon to resist and how can we claim or reclaim our power, identities and lives? In this five-week, online workshop, students will use poetic form as a tool of resistance, empowerment and reclamation. We’ll explore a variety of forms, both traditional and experimental, including the pantoum, elegy, epistle, erasure, sonnet and list poem. Readings will include poetry by Dorothy Chan, Solmaz Sharif, Saida Agostini, Saeed Jones, K. Iver, Don Mee Choi, Philip Levine, Natalie Diaz, Juan Felippe Herrara and many others. Each week we’ll do generative writing exercises in class and workshop one another’s poems, offering attentive, considered feedback. Class sessions will meet synchronously via Zoom, and assignments, poems and critiques will be shared via Wet Ink.
Workshop Details
Joan Kwon Glass is the author of Night Swim (Diode Editions, 2022) and three chapbooks, including If Rust Can Grow on the Moon (Milk & Cake Press, 2022). She serves as poet laureate of Milford, CT, editor-in-chief of Harbor Review and a Brooklyn Poets Bridge mentor. Glass’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, the Margins, Hayden’s Ferry Review, RHINO, Dialogist and elsewhere.