Poetic Form as a Means of Revision with Trevor Ketner (Zoom)

We will work together to understand how to see poetic forms not as restrictive, prescriptive rulesets that limit creativity, but as launch pads and sandboxes for revising our poems. By reading poems that work in, with, and against form, writing in relationship to form ourselves, and understanding the various ways in which form can help us recontextualize our own poems when they aren’t quite working, participants will leave this session with a new set of tools for revising their own poems. Forms we will cover include: pantoums, sestinas, haibuns, burning haibuns, ghazals, and others.

Writers should bring one or two of their in-progress poems that they’ve been working on but can’t quite seem to get over the finish line. We will be applying some of the strategies during the session to those poems. All experience levels welcome.

BIO: Trevor Ketner is the author of The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire (Wesleyan University Press, 2023) and [WHITE] (University of Georgia Press, 2021) a winner of the National Poetry Series. Their chapbooks include Self-Portrait as Chimera in a Convex Mirror (Gasher Press, 2026), Negative of a Photo of Fire (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019), White Combine: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (The Atlas Review, 2019), and Major Arcana: Minneapolis, winner of the 2017 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. They have been published in Poetry, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. Their prose can be found in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Boston Review, and Lambda Literary. They have been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, Lambda Literary, Poets House, The Poetry Project, and Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. They hold an MFA from the University of Minnesota and live in Manhattan with their husband.