Both poets and readers turn to poetry to grapple with questions about life, death, mortality, Big Mind, God, Enlightenment, etc. For six weeks, we will explore how we, as poetry-writers, can craft artistically satisfying persona-narrators and deploy well-crafted techniques for this material, without sentimentality or abstraction. We will write exercises based on the emotionally and physically grounded work of various poets such as Kaveh Akbar, Grace Schulman, hymns in The Golden Ass by Apuleius, Emily Dickinson, the Psalmists, Wislawa Symborska, Kabir, Joy Harjo, or Allen Ginsberg.

All are welcome: poets, writers who have never written a poem, or anyone in between. This class is open to new, current, and returning Writers Studio students and meets weekly via Google Meet. The Google Meets are not recorded.

Students attend class via Google Meet (with or without cameras enabled). The entire class takes place during this class meeting: students share their work, which is read aloud; students offer their classmates feedback; the teacher responds to each student's work; and the teacher discusses the next week’s exercise.

Students who have taken three or more terms of a six-week class are eligible for Level 2 or an Intermediate class.

Instructor

Writers Studio Teacher

Lisa Bellamy

Lisa Bellamy is the author of The Northway, a full-length poetry collection (Terrapin Books). Her chapbook Nectar won The Aurorean’s poetry chapbook contest. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, The Sun, Massachusetts Review, New Ohio Review, The Southern Review, Sho, Allium, Verse Daily, Hotel Amerika, Salamander, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Chautauqua, Kestrel, Gyroscope Review, The Southampton Review, Calyx, Cimarron Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction (2nd-place competition prize), Tiferet, Anglican Theological Review, PANK, Christian Century, and Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia (University of Georgia Press), among other publications. She has received two Pushcart Prizes, a Fugue Poetry Prize, honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and has been featured in podcasts, including The Writer’s Almanac. The U.N. Network on Migration featured her poem "Yoho" in its 2022 exhibition. She is a graduate of Princeton University. Lisa is working on new collections of poetry and short fantasy prose.

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