Knit, pearl, quilt: How to Refresh your Poetry Practice with Craft Techniques from Fiber Art with Page Hill Starzinger (via Zoom)

If you’re like me, you look for new ways to evolve–and sharpen—your writing—from syntax and word choice to form. One approach I’ve found successful is to apply the techniques of Fiber Arts to poetry—knitting, stitching, pearling, and quilting words, phrases, stanzas, and poems. In this class, we will look at interlinking words (knitting), collecting knotted phrases (quipu), piecing stanzas with precise cutting (quilting), mending (sewing), fastening or attaching objects (sewing), and more. We will begin the class with a list of the techniques, look at the fiber craft, move to examples of poems/prose that approximate the technique, and discuss. At the end of class, we will review a list of prompts that combine the techniques or offer vehicles for the techniques. Each student will walk away with a handout that reflects the workshop start-to-finish—techniques to examples to prompts.

NB: This class will be taught on Zoom and will be capped at 1 s5tudents. Registrants will receive the Zoom link to the email address they use to register. It will arrive immediately after registration so please check your spam folder if you do not receive it. It will also be sent the day before class as a reminder. Please review the course policies page before registering for any classes. Please email ask @writerscenter.org with any questions.

The scholarship application for the Altman Person of Color Scholarships, the Need-Based Scholarships, and the Limp Wrist LGBTQIA+ Scholarship will be available on May 15th and will be due on May 30th for all summer classes.

Page Hill Starzinger’s second book, Vortex Street (2020) was selected for the Grand Prize Short List in Poetry from the Eric Hoffer Award Committee. Her first book, Vestigial (2013) was chosen by Lynn Emanuel to win the Barrow Street Poetry Prize. Both books are from Barrow Street Press. Page’s chapbook, Unshelter was winner of the Noemi Chapbook Contest in 2009 judged by Mary Jo Bang. Starzinger’s poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Fence, West Branch, Pleiades, Volt, and others. Page was Copy Director at Aveda for almost twenty years, and co-authored A Bouquet from the Met (Abrams, 1998). She lives in New York City. PageHillStarzinger.com