Poetry’s Strange, Surreal Forest: Cultivating the Delightfully Odd in Our Poems with Lauren Brazeal Garza (via Zoom)

In this four hour poetry intensive, will we will discover ways to encourage delightful oddness within our poems through experimentation, discussion, and generative prompts. First, we will first explore the art of persona poetry: discussing how the “I” in persona poems differs from the “lyric I,” and how the safe distance created by this difference invites new ideas and ways of thinking in our verse. We will also venture into the exciting wilderness of erasure poems—whether generated by redacting found literature, or from our own written words. With each form, we will explore representative poems from poets like Louise Gluck, Eduardo Corral, Philip Metres and Lisa Huffaker; and each discussion will be followed by a generative prompt. During our time together, participants will have the opportunity to read and have each draft discussed in a supportive capacity following our generative prompts. I will also offer additional suggested reading so participants can continue their exploration of these forms, at the close of the course.

NB: This class will be taught on Zoom (Saturday, June 29, 12:30-4:30 PM ET) and will be capped at 15 students. 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 misty@writerscenter.org with any questions.

All HVWC scholarship applications will be available on May 1 and will be due on May 15 for all summer/fall 2024 classes.

Lauren Brazeal Garza‘s published poetry collections include Gutter (YesYes Books, 2018), which chronicles her homelessness as a teenager. She has also published three chapbooks of poetry and flash fiction, most recently Santa Muerte Santa Muerte: I was Here Release Me (Tram Editions, 2023), which features persona poems in the form of fictional interviews with ghosts. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Poetry Northwest, Waxwing, and Verse Daily among many other journals. She earned her M.F.A. in poetry from Bennington College, and is a PhD candidate in Literature at the University of Texas at Dallas.