Failure: A Poetry Workshop

As you have probably noticed, poetry is inextricable from failure. Every poem is in some sense a failure as poems so often arise from impossible desires. But not all failures are the same. Failures of expression—fragmentation, hesitation, etc.—can themselves be expressive. And the power of the poetic line largely derives from its failure to reach the right margin of the page, allowing it to figure what language can’t contain. We will discuss some of the most beautiful failures in recent American poetry and test out ways of charging our own poems with negativity.