Unless otherwise noted, all workshops are held via Zoom.
Please email jswilliams1307@gmail.com to register.
Accepted forms of payment: PayPal, Venmo, Zelle, or mailed check.
This workshop will delve deeply into a number of Oliver’s poems, including her themes, style, and perspective, focusing on her nature, animal-focused, aging, and compassionate poems, via active group discussion and writing prompts and some writing time to help you engage more directly with and be inspired by her work…putting her lessons into practice. And the class includes a 41-page handout!
Consistently submitting to and being published in literary magazines, both in print and online, is a crucial step in reaching new readers, creating a community around your work, and being taken more seriously by book publishers.
In this new workshop series, I will provide you with all the tools and strategies you’ll need to successfully target and get accepted by literary magazines. From researching to cover letter writing, bookkeeping to submission tracking, goalsetting to retaining your enthusiasm (and sanity), you will learn how to get your publishing career off the ground…and your poetry into stellar magazines.
Structurally, sessions will involve direct instruction but will mainly focus on your individual needs. We will meet to report progress, brainstorm, complain, celebrate victories, gather info, ask craft and submission questions, and strategize successful creative accountability. We will also share our work with the group and help each other group poems into ready-to-submit batches.
The elegy in English, from the 1600s to its current articulations, has been employed as a genre of poetry in which poets mourn the dead. At the same time, directly or indirectly, poets often deploy this genre to critique and resist what they view as oppressive and violent aspects of their societies: religious, psychological, political, sexual, and moral.
In this class, we will read and write elegies, using our readings to inspire us and as a means of generating our own poems. We will explore the elegy’s function as a “work” of mourning for the dead, while widening this genre in order to reflect on not only the deceased, but on other kinds of loss we have experienced.
We will study diverse poems from poets such as W.S. Merwin, Dorianne Laux, Kevin Young, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Marie Howe, Roger Reeves, Claudia Emerson, Walt Whitman, and many more to see how they successfully explore themselves and the world through the elegy.
THE WORKSHOP INCLUDES:
· Two 150-minute sessions with poem exploration and Q&A
· Multiple prompts and writing activities each session
· Bonus sample poems provided between sessions
· Active discussion of sample poems from diverse contemporary poets
· A chance to more intimately engage with a small, focused writing community
Are you ready to write a lot of poetry and receive feedback on them all? Do you have older poems you’d like critiqued as well?
Similar to the goals of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), the aims of this self-paced class is to write 30 poems in 30 days. However, you might write one poem a day, or several poems in a day, and then give yourself a break. You can also simply send me up to 30 pages of older poems you’d like critiqued. It’s totally up to you!
Whether you’re writing to a specific theme, assembling a group of poems for a chapbook, or you want to try writing a longer poetic sequence, this workshop is meant to support you with generative prompts and experiences to get you creating plenty of new work.
What This Workshop Provides:
· 30 Days’ Worth of Writing Prompts
· A professional critique of all 30 poems as you send them, be it one each day or all 30 at the end of the month
· Ability to ask John writing questions any time during the month
Cliché creeps into poetry because it’s easy. Writing is hard enough without interrogating every metaphor, every adjective, every simile. We reach for the familiar because it’s safe. Everyone knows what “the weight of the world on my shoulders” means, so when we’re struggling with a particular poem, it’s the easy line, the borrowed metaphor, the stand-in for something we’re too afraid or too tired to say.
When we write poetry, we’re trying to summon what’s real. Not the postcard version of life but uncovering the true layers behind what we observe – say, a limp bouquet, a coughing sob or a moth hammering a porch light – and persuading it to stand still long enough to reveal its truth. A poem must earn this; it must split open the ordinary and let something emerge, fresh and alive.
In this virtual workshop, we will use a variety of cliché-busting writing exercises and prompts to generate creative imagery, verbs, descriptors, and other elements for your poems. This will be a truly interactive workshop in which all poets will revise their work together, actively discuss the changes, brainstorm other approaches for each other’s poems, and ask each other questions to strengthen their work and ready it for submission (and acceptance)!
This workshop includes a robust 15-page handout with 9 distinct strategies and over a dozen activities, each followed by time for sharing.
Devised recently by Terrance Hayes in homage to Gwendolyn Brooks, the innovative new Golden Shovel form enters into an intimate conversation with another poem by using their words as the final words in each of your lines. Part cento, part erasure, and all inspiration, the Golden Shovel is far more than merely serving as an exercise in poetic form. Golden Shovel poems are a fresh and vital way of embracing and documenting voices around us that must be heard and felt.
The golden shovel form has already been embraced by many influential poets since Hayes first invented the form, including Billy Collins, Andrew Motion, George Szirtes, Inua Ellams, Nick Makoha, Maxine Kumin, Langston Kerman, John Burnside, Raymond Antrobus, Don Share, Jacob Polley, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Phillip Levine, and Nikki Grimes.
This intimate workshop will include lessons, analysis of well-known Golden Shovels, in-class activities and writing, and sharing drafts with the class.
A Duplex is a poetic form recently created by Jericho Brown. It’s a poem of couplets that grows off of itself, where the first line of each next couplet mirrors the previous line (the last line of the couplet before it) and then the last line of the couplet introduces a new idea or image. The very first and very last lines of the poem mirror each other as well. This intimate workshop will include lessons, analysis of well-known Duplexes, in-class activities and writing, and sharing drafts with the class.
Carl Phillips is the author of 17 books of poetry, most recently Scattered Snows, to the North (2024) and Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. His other honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets.
This workshop will delve deeply into a number of Phillips’ poems, including his themes, style, and perspective, focusing on his animal/nature, spiritual, and mythology-based poems, via active group discussion and writing prompts and some writing time to help you engage more directly with and be inspired by his work…putting his lessons into practice. And the class includes a 43-page handout!