with Georgia Pearle
8 Mondays/ 2/05-3/26
from 6 to 9
$270
In our eight weeks together, we will cultivate an attunement to the sensory world, find the spaces where language can propel itself through silence, and sharpen our incisors on the formal elements that make poetry ring clearly and beautifully.
To begin, we’ll work to excavate each writer’s particular purposes, obsessions, and themes, so we have fuel to burn us across those dreaded blank pages and sometimes sputtering drafts. Once we have our materials together, next we will gather our tools.
We will be reading to steal from poets both ancient and contemporary, with a particular eye to their use of image, sound, and prosody, rhythm, voice and tone, breaks in lines and stanzas, and other elements of form. As a community of writers coming to poetry, we will also discuss (and practice) how to be good first readers for each other’s fledgling drafts. Too, we’ll approach revision together, finding ways to scratch closer and closer to our poems’ best final forms.
While it’s possible every generation has a good Dickinson, scrawling alone with little audience, we’ll write with the presumption that somewhere and somehow, we’ll have readers and listeners for our work. To that end, we’ll also approach how to get poems into print, how to decide where to aim when trying to publish, and how to read and perform our own poems so that they’re as live for our audiences as they are in our own minds.
Georgia Pearle is an alumna of Smith College and holds an MFA in Poetry from Lesley University. Her work has appeared in OffCite, the Houston Chronicle, Crab Creek Review, and WSQ, and is forthcoming from The Rumpus and Kenyon Review. A former coordinator of the VIDA Count, she is now the Digital Editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, where she has also been a Nonfiction Editor and the Online Poetry Editor. She has taught writing for the Center for the Living Arts, Inprint, and the University of Houston, where she is a fourth year Doctoral Fellow in Creative Writing and Literature.