Miracles for Breakfast: Writing Like Elizabeth Bishop & Friends [Carolyne Wright]
“I don’t like teaching,” were the words with which Elizabeth Bishop began her legendary workshops at the University of Washington, “but we’ll practice the most basic, useful poetic strategy — to write in form.” In this workshop modeled on her example, we will read poems in form by Bishop, Weldon Kees, neo-Formalists, and others. We’ll explore how form helps poets achieve surprising leaps in their language and try forms such as pantoum, triolet, villanelle, and abecedarian.
Suggested texts: Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927-1979. Farrar, Straus, Giroux (any edition) or Elizabeth Bishop, Poems. FSG, 2011. An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art. U of Michigan Press, 2002.
No class May 26.
