Me-search Poetry: Locating the heart of emotion in research-based poetry IN PERSON with Gregory Pardlo

Documentary poetics, verse journalism, lyric essay–these and creative practices inspired by research can produce poems that are as dry as newsprint and chalk dust unless we tap into the sources of the interests that motivate our research. Then we have to strike a careful balance that allows our interests to illuminate the material without reducing our research to a form of self-indulgence. In this course, we will consider some strategies gleaned from published works to inform experiments with our own research material.

This in-person class will be held at HVWC in Sleepy Hollow, NY. It will be capped at 8 students.

All HVWC scholarship applications will be available on Dec 1 and will be due on Dec 15 for all winter/spring 2024 classes.

Gregory Pardlo was born in Philadelphia in 1968. He is the author of Air Traffic: A Memoir of Ambition and Manhood in America (Knopf, 2018), a memoir in essays, and the poetry collections Digest (Four Way Books, 2014), which received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and was shortlisted for the 2015 NAACP Image Award, and Totem (American Poetry Review), which was selected by Brenda Hillman for the American Poetry Review/Honickman Prize in 2007.

Of his work, Cyrus Cassells writes, “Pardlo is a modern griot and shape-shifter, a Prospero of unforced allusion: an up-for-anything Pardlo poem can deftly evoke sociology, jazz, lofty philosophy, African-American lit, Russian cinema, Greek mythology, European travel, film noir, hip hop, and a host of other topics.”

Pardlo is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. He is the poetry editor of Virginia Quarterly Review and teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers University, Camden. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

(Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths)