Monday Night Poetry with Kathleen Ossip

Poetry is a way to pay attention—to language, to the world, to what it feels like to be alive. In this workshop, we explore how to balance that attention with craft, intuition, and inspiration. We look at the building blocks of poems from individual words through lines, stanzas, fragments, paragraphs. We look at important elements of style: tone, diction, form, metaphor, clarity. We also investigate inspiration: what activities or inactivities can summon it, how to use it when it happens. We’ll read a variety of modern and contemporary poets, selected according to students’ interests and needs. The focus of the class is on your work.