POETRY WORKSHOPS

“Talking In Things” | a generative poetry writing workshop @ Stanford Continuing Studies (Jan 13 - Mar 17 2025, in-person, Mondays, 6:00-8:30 pm)

In this generative poetry workshop, we will explore the pleasure and power of talking in things—that is, using concrete nouns in poems. Learning to “talk in things” is the swiftest way to increase the power of your writing and make its generation faster and more fun. We will keep notebooks to capture concrete details from our memories and daily lives to infuse our poems with that power. We will practice techniques adapted from improv comedy and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities to help realize our own imaginary places. We will write discernibly about what has not happened and explore how ancient Chinese and Japanese poets used nouns to create a sense of time and world. We will even discover how the noun-generation power of AI can prompt us to invent unprecedented things to say. And, of course, we will look to modern and contemporary poets as our guides, including Langston Hughes, Louise Glück, Mary Ruefle, and Ada Limón. In each class session, we will begin by looking closely at poems published by others and then talk about poems you have made. Each week, you will write a new poem in reply to a prompt emerging from our conversations. You will leave the course with a portfolio of new work, a new community of peers, and a new sense of how to “talk in things.”

“Poetry As Play” | a generative poetry writing workshop @ Stanford Continuing Studies (7 weeks, in-person, Mondays, 6:30-9:20 pm)

Beginning on June 24th, 2024, I will be teaching a 7-week generative poetry workshop on Monday evenings through the Stanford Continuing Studies program. The class will take place in-person at Stanford in Palo Alto. You can view the course description and a preliminary syllabus here.

HOW TO WORK WITH ME

If you want to explore what it might mean for us to work together, write me a short message using the form below. Tell me a little bit about yourself, what sort of work you might be interested in doing, and what if any background you have as a writer or as a maker in other media. If you’ve written poetry before and would like to work on poetry together, you are welcome to include a poem you have written at the bottom of your message.

MY BACKGROUND AS AN EDUCATOR

From 2012 through 2020, I taught undergraduate seminars in poetry and nonfiction writing at Yale University. I have also taught creative writing and literature at Wesleyan University, Deep Springs College, the Pratt Institute, the Bard Prison Initiative, the Yale Prison Education Initiative, the University of Iowa, the Yale Writers’ Conference, the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, the Bridge School in Shanghai, and elsewhere. I am lucky to have learned the art of teaching from my own great mentors, including Louise Glück, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Lucie Brock-Broido, Geoffrey Nutter, Langdon Hammer, Fred Strebeigh, and many others. And no one has taught me more about teaching than my students.

The first poetry writing course I ever taught took place in 2002 at the Exploration Summer Program for high school students, which I had also attended as a student in the 90s. Although my teaching since then has taken place primarily at the college level, it still draws its spirit from summer camp-style education—where there are no grades, where we understand that real growth happens when we feel free to play around, explore, and have fun. My teaching style depends on building a personal connection that allows me to understand who a writer is and what they need from me to grow.