“THE LIVING VOICE” : CREATING A POEM’S UNIQUE SPEAKER with Yerra Sugarman (via Zoom)

In this workshop, we will explore how a distinctive speaking voice in a poem—the nuanced utterance of a specific speaker and the creation of a particular character—gives rise to an unforgettable work. How does this subtle element called “voice” connect a reader with the idiosyncratic person who is talking? How does a speaker’s voice engage us, excite us, and pull us into the psyche of the individual who is revealing aspects of the way they think, feel, and live? As the poet Tony Hoagland once observed, “A poem strong in the dimension of voice is an animate thing of shifting balances, tones, and temperature, by turns intimate, confiding, vulgar, distant, or cunning—but, above all, alive.” In this class, we will take pleasure in and generate poems that are memorable for the ways a speaking “voice” brings life to them as their connective tissue.

NB: This class will be taught on Zoom (Sunday, July 28, 12:30-2:30 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.

Yerra Sugarman is the author of three volumes of poetry: Aunt Bird (Four Way Books, 2022), which won the American Book Fest’s 2022 Best Book Award for General Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award as well for the New England Poetry Club’s Motton Book Prize; The Bag of Broken Glass (Sheep Meadow Press, 2008), poems from which received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; and Forms of Gone (Sheep Meadow Press, 2002), winner of PEN American Center’s Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. Her other honors include the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, and a “Discovery”/The Nation Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Nation, New England Review and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University, and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. She is an American poet, essayist, and teacher, living in New York City. The daughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors, she grew up in a community of Holocaust survivors in Toronto, Canada. She serves as a board member for Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.