Grackle Art by Ann Stern
What makes a poem sound, and thereby feel, alive—as if the poem itself were thinking, arguing, appealing, confessing: making its language up in real time? “Voice” can be an elusive and mysterious element in poetic craft, hard to define and challenging to enact. Yet, when a poem’s “voice” rings true, it embodies, as Tony Hoagland writes, “the presence of a self, a personality or a sensibility…[and] communicates the history of how that sensibility developed.”
In this six-week workshop, we’ll focus on how a poem’s voice connects speaker and reader. We’ll practice animating the way a poem speaks, hesitates, declares, contradicts itself, embodying a plausible speaker. Guided by Hoagland’s The Art of Voice, we’ll explore how poets create authority and intimacy through declaration and doubt, how they move between formal and colloquial registers, and how borrowed voices, vernacular speech, and syntactical patterning give poems their social and emotional power.
Each week, we’ll pair a specific craft focus with generative prompts designed to enrich a poem’s range of tonalities. We’ll write poems that convey the mind in motion, dramatizing its contradictions and frictions on the page. We’ll practice syncopating different voices to discover how poems orchestrate multiplicity without collapsing into chaos.
This workshop is for poets who want their work to feel more immediate, more spontaneous, more human. Expect close reading, discussion, generative writing, and a supportive workshop. You’ll leave with new drafts, a sharper sense of vocal possibilities, and fresh strategies to carry into your future writing.
Sarah Anne Stinnett is a poet, educator, and interdisciplinary artist. She teaches at Berklee Online and Southern New Hampshire University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Poet Lore, Plume, Tar River Poetry, and Chicago Quarterly Review. Her book was named finalist for the Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award and the Perugia Press First Poetry Book Prize. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and an ALM in Dramatic Arts from Harvard University.
