Is there anything new under the sun?
In this generative poetry workshop, we will have a good time with the idea of originality, attending to lyrics, songs, ads, and other local phenomena as source material from which to create our own poems. No experience with poetry is needed and all knowledge will be welcome, especially when it comes to designing new forms. I’ll bring a few prompts to class each week to get things rolling, but we’ll also spend time crafting new prompts with the idea of creating a mini-source book that can be added to after the course has concluded.
We will borrow techniques from translation (no language expertise required), Oulipian play, long-established poetic forms and stuff we see around town to write new poems each class. Experimenting with various approaches, we’ll find out what shines and, if it doesn’t, how we might turn into something that does.
Nick Rattner is a poet and translator. A past resident at the Vermont Studio Center and the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, his work has appeared / will soon appear in Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Sixth Finch, Pleiades, Asymptote, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Denver Quarterly, Salt Hill, and Grist. He also co-translated Yván Yauri’s Viento de fuego / Fire Wind (2011) with Marta del Pozo. At present, he is translating the work of poet Juan Andrés García Román from the Spanish. A former basketball writer and editor for Ugly Duckling Presse, he now serves as Editor-in-Chief of Gulf Coast.
Grackle image by Diane Bradley.
