Beyond “I love you”: Syntactic Strategies for Poems with Martha Collins via Zoom

This four hour workshop will begin with a discussion of a variety of syntactic strategies for writing poems that get beyond the predictable subject-verb-object sentence (“I love you”). Using examples of published poems, we’ll explore ways in which syntax and prosody—sentence and line—can work together to create complex poetic textures.

This workshop will take place via Zoom. Login instructions will be provided at the time of registration via email. Tickets are $124 for this 4hour intensive course.There are two Altman Person of Color Scholarships, which are free and given on a first come, first served basis. Please register at:

https://www.writerscenter.org/calendar/marthacollins/

In addition to giving you a number of ideas for crafting new poems, this discussion may provide focus for our consideration of your own poems in the second part of the workshop.  Please e-mail a copy of one poem that you’re not yet satisifed with to jennifer@writerscenter.org by Thursday August 27th at noon.

Martha Collins’ tenth book of poetry, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019) is a sequence of poems addressed to her husband following his unexpected death. Her previous volumes include two linked sequences, Night Unto Night and Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2014, 2018), as well as three works that focus on race: Admit One: An American Scrapbook (Pittsburgh, 2016), White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012), and the book-length poem Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006). The latter won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember from 2006” by the New York Public Library. Collins’ other awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation, as well as two Ohioana awards, three Pushcart Prizes, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, and the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize. Collins has also published four volumes of co-translated Vietnamese poetry and co-edited, with Kevin Prufer, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf, 2017). Other co-edited works include two volumes in the Unsung Masters Series and a collection of essays about the poet Jane Cooper. Founder of the Creative Writing Program at U.Mass.-Boston and former Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College, Collins currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her website is marthacollinspoet.com