Culling & Counterpointing: Fall Poetry Workshop

As the shortest days of the year approach, this intensive six-week workshop will lay the foundations—the fruitful store—for a winter’s writing labor. Participants will be encouraged to bring 6 pieces of writing to the table, one each week, single poems or parts of longer projects, to consider strategies for developing and expanding this core of work over the next season. The workshop will focus on craft and revision, exploring lineation, musicality, syntax, imagery, viewpoint, narrative, description, and tone. A customized reading list will be circulated to the group after each session, based on the material just presented. Each workshop will also include an optional take-home writing prompt, and an excerpt from (or revisitation of) a prose touchstone for garnering and gleaning: Keats’s letters, Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, Stevens’s A Necessary Angel, Lorca’s “Theory and Play of the Duende,” Frost’s “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Mary Ruefle Madness, Rack, and Honey, among others resources. Interested participants are asked to send 3 poems (no more than 5 pages) so that we can get to know your voice before you enroll.

6 Mondays, 7:00–9:30 p.m., 11/17/2014–12/22/2014

B.K. FISCHER is the author of the novel-in-verse Mutiny Gallery, which won the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize from Truman State University Press, and St. Rage’s Vault, which won the 2012 Washington Prize from The Word Works. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Boston Review, Literary Mama, WSQ, The Hopkins Review, Ekphrasis, Southwest Review, Western Humanities Review, FIELD, and other journals. Author of a critical study of the intersections of visual and verbal art, Museum Mediations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry (Routledge, 2006), Fischer is a frequent writer of criticism and review essays. She holds a B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, an M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from New York University, and has taught writing and literature at Columbia, NYU, and Marymount College. Since 2012, she has been a poetry editor at Boston Review.

Register at http://writerscenter.org/courses/culling-and-counterpointing-fall-poetry-workshop