24PearlStreet Workshops and Events
LIVE via ZOOM: 4pm-6pm (Eastern Time)
Through the reading of published poems and daily writing prompts, this workshop will explore syntactic strategies for getting beyond the predictable subject-verb-object sentence (“I love you”), and in the process explore ways in which syntax and prosody—sentence and line—work together to create complex poetic textures.
You should leave the workshop with the beginnings of four new poems. For class discussion of your poems (which will comprise most of each day’s workshop), you may share work begun during the week, or earlier poems that don’t yet satisfy you.
Biography
Martha Collins has published eleven books of poetry, most recently Casualty Reports (Pittsburgh, 2022) and Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019); the latter won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. She has also co-translated five volumes of Vietnamese poetry, most recently Dreaming the Mountain by Tuệ Sỹ, with Nguyen Ba Chung (Milkweed, 2023), and co-edited, with Kevin Prufer, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf, 2017). Collins founded the UMASS Boston creative writing program and for ten years served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin.
