Most of life’s experiences transcend or defy explanation, yet it is often precisely that which is confounding, mysterious, elusive, or fleeting we feel called (or pulled) to write about. “Poetry exists to give name to the nameless.” (Audre Lorde.) A poem functions as a work of art that translates the ineffable into language—heightened or familiar—that comes as close as possible to lived experience. We’ll explore key poetic forms and techniques that utilize memory, personal history, grief, celebration, desire, trauma, and sensation as valuable tools by which to powerfully render unwieldy human experience in language. Brief readings will be assigned; short craft lessons and discussion are followed by intensive workshop of participants’ poems. Participants will bring three poems, 17 copies each, for which input is desired, to the first workshop meeting.
BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY was born in Okinawa, Japan and grew up in Southern California. She received her BA in Literature and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she earned an MFA at Columbia University. She is the author of Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008) – winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999) – which was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry.She has also won a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her most recent collection of poetry is Our Andromeda, (Copper Canyon Press, September 2012). Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Bomb, Boston Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Shaughnessy is the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission Artist Fellowship. She is the Poetry Editor at Tin House Magazine, and currently teaches Creative Writing at Princeton University and The Eugene Lang College at the New School.
View poet's page
