24PearlStreet Workshops and Events
What is creative influence and how can we best use it? The first week of this course we’ll read and discuss sets of poems from six different contemporary poets: Anne Carson, Ciaran Carson, Natalie Diaz, Yusef Komunyakaa, Thylias Moss and Alicia Ostriker. We’ll collectively identify each poet’s defining strategies, themes, attitudes and forms. For the workshop’s remaining three weeks, you’ll pick the four poets from this group who interest you most, writing towards and workshopping four finished poems: imitations, adaptations or—if necessary—intelligent rejections of those influences. Our goal is immersion followed by refinement of who you are as a poet after you’ve submitted yourself to a series of invigorating, conflicting influences.
Biography
Daisy Fried is the author of four books of poetry: The Year the City Emptied, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It. She has been awarded Guggenheim, Hodder, and Pew Fellowships. She is an occasional poetry critic for the New York Times, Poetry Foundation and elsewhere; poetry editor for the journal Scoundrel Time; and a member of the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Philadelphia.
