The Structure of Poetic Turns with Jay Deshpande

Although lyric poems can sometimes feel nebulous or unsystematic, they are most often built on certain rhetorical structures that shape our expectations, then surprise us. So how do you create your own poems on these principles? This one-day course will explore four different “turns” that occur in contemporary poems, using shifts in rhetoric to captivate and excite. We will examine poems by Rilke, James Wright, Louise Glück, Lynn Melnick, Tarfia Faizullah, John Murillo, and more. Students will practice generating their own versions of these turns and will leave the class with a deeper sense for structure in the poems they read and write.

Jay Deshpande is the author of the poetry collection Love the Stranger (YesYes Books), named one of the top debuts of 2015 by Poets & Writers, and the chapbook The Rest of the Body. He has received fellowships or support from Kundiman, Civitella Ranieri, Saltonstall Arts Colony, and the Key West Literary Seminar. Poems have recently appeared in Bost…