🗓  8 classes, March 21st - May 9th

🕰️ 2.5 hour sessions, Thursdays 6:30pm-9pm

🗺 Location: TBA (most likely a space in Brooklyn!)

💰 Tuition: Sliding scale of $80-$250

📋 Apply: Here

About

This eight week class/workshop/space for creation will be a gentle incubator for those curious to unlock the poetry inside of them. Maybe the poetry inside of you is concise and heavy, maybe its messy and splotchy, maybe its icy or bubbly or chewy, maybe its hilarious or heart-wrenching - maybe its all of these things! This class is for all experience levels: those practiced as well as those new to the craft, Those creatively blocked, as well as those ripe ready to leap with ideas!

This class will aim to explore and perhaps discover components of a poetic voice. It will endeavor to scratch the surface of some of the elements needed to discover and sustain a personalized, fertile creative practice for writing poetry.

Providing:

• An intimate cohort
• A study of a range of poems, poets, poetic resources to take home and chew on! (Dare I say, homework? I promise, only fun stuff though!) ((For example, readings of a few poems that exemplify a form or component we’ve discussed, perhaps a podcast episode about poetry, perhaps an excerpt from a poet writing about their process, etc.))
• Workshopping and discussions
• 2-3 guest teachers (published poets, poetry educators)
• A final sharing day of original poetry

This will be a horizontal room of collaborative thought and creation! I am not so interested in what writing “good” or even “the best kind of poetry” looks like. What I am most excited about is all of the things that poetry CAN be. In some ways, I think everything is poetry!

Finally, I think it is important to note: I am certainly not a collegiate poetry professor. I am no decorated poetry prodigy. I am simply a writer of poetry trying to follow my poetic thread, and deepen my practice - If you are curious to find or follow your poetic thread, this class may be a great place to do so!

more specifically…

We will meet for eight weeks, 2 hours a week!

class breakdown :

• 6:30-7:30pm -
• Check in (snacks, dinner will be welcome during class)
• Discuss homework readings/listenings from the week before
• Lesson
• 7:30-9pm -
• workshopping each other’s poems, iterations / idea building
• poem generating with optional prompts

Before the first class, I will create a Shared Google drive which will house all class materials, a folder for each of our 8 session. The folder for session one will have a couple of brief introductory readings on process/act of writing poetry. (Nevertheless, take everything you read under the guise of “how to” with a grain of salt. I like to think of cultivating any creative practice like a bespoke toolbox - pocket what works, leave what doesn’t jive with you!)

Before the first class, I will ask each student to:

• Share in the session one Google drive a poem that you love/like/that stuck with you from your time on planet Earth, or elsewhere
• Share a poem that you’ve written in the past year. If you’ve never written a poem, here is your opportunity to start (:

Before every class thereafter, I will ask each student to:

• Spend time with the homework nuggets each week before the following class (I will not inundate you with HW - maybe 15-30 mins of listenings/readings/videos)
• Write a poem loosely informed by the previous week’s lesson, drop it into the next session’s Google drive 48 hours before the next class, to allow your cohort to leave you questions, comments, thoughts, musings (we will discuss these musings in the workshop part of the class)

As of my writing this Notion page, this is the class structure I am deciding on. However, I welcome what ever shape we feel inclined to take - we can always adjust where our attention is going, or how our time is allocated.

Class 1:

Intro Class - Orienting To Poetry

Class 2:

The Body of The Poem - Activation Through Form

Class 3:

The Material of The Poem - Activation Through Content

Class 4:

The Poem on the Senses - Activation Through Image

Class 5:

A Poet Has Endless Voices - Activation Through Voice

With Guest Teacher: Montana Roesch

Class 6:

No Poem is in a Vacuum - Poetry That Replies, That Answers Back

Class 7:

Personal Expression - Dream Poetry, Confessional Poetry, Word Play, Sound Play, You In The Poetry

With Guest Teacher: Jane Scheiber

Jane Scheiber is a poet and editor from Lyme, Connecticut. In 2022, she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Harold Taylor Prize, and the Jane Brinkley Fellowship with the Poetry Society of New York. Jane is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Love and Squalor and was a 2023 Summer Editorial Lead for Milk Press. Her recent preoccupations concern the animal body in tension and in coalescence with the human mind, and how language can enter or resist lived immediacy. Jane lives in Brooklyn with her fiancé, the actor and musician Charlie Lockwood, and their cat, Miso.

Class 8:

Poetic Portfolio - Share Day!

The instructor

Hi (: I am a writer, actor, producer, and matchmaker queer who loves existing in flux, creative containers. I am perennially drawn to creating new personas; taking on new identities through my art - whether it be in a literary cabaret, in a role, or in a poem. The themes that peek through in my poetry are always changing but right now, they are as follows: things we collectively decide are ugly (and perhaps becoming the ugly thing itself), the erotic in the innocuous, alter egos unlocked through movement, dank odors and dreams.