Poetry
November 13-17, 2023
Open to All
Tiered Tuition
$
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ASYNCHRONOUS
What is the age-old attraction of the short poem for poets and readers alike and how can we learn, through our examination of a selection of brief poems, how to create a small poem that packs a huge punch. In this class, we will examine the way short poems can serve any purpose—they can be political, calls to action, list poems, love poems. They can be imagistic, didactic, or philosophical. Simple or abstract, they can focus on an image or engage the senses. They can be grounded in reality or ignite the reader’s imagination. They can be language driven or meaning driven. The short poem is deceptive. They are not easy to write because every word needs to be right. Every word has more weight. They are often beguiling, magical, fierce, and powerful. They tell a secret. They linger and embed themselves into one’s consciousness. They often become friends to call upon in times of joy or in times of grief. We will examine poems by Dickinson, Tu Fu, Celan, Dove, Brown, Alexander, Gregg, Gilbert, Chang, Valentine, Ostriker, Howe, Dougherty, Chen, Merwin, Youn, Hughes, Hayden, Cavafy, Szymborska, Simic, Kaminsky, Smith, Rilke, Larkin, Daye, Laird, Cisneros, Milosz, and others. We will write our own short poems through a series of prompts and we will share and revise this work throughout the class.
Jennifer Franklin
is the author of four poetry collections, including If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, 2023), finalist for the Paterson Prize and Julie Suk Award. Poems from her forthcoming collection, A Fire In Her Brain, (epistolary poems to Virginia Woolf, Lucia Joyce, and Sylvia Plath) have been published in American Poetry Review, The Bennington Review, Poetry Northwest, The Montreal International Poetry Anthology, Prairie Schooner, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and as a "poem-a-day” on poets.org. Her work has been commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum and published in The Paris Review, The Nation, The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature, and as part of the Poetry Society of America’s “Poetry in Motion” series. Her work has been supported by The T.S. Eliot Foundation, NYFA/City Arts Corp, Poetry by the Sea (Jon Tribble Editing Fellowship), and Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation. She was interviewed for the forthcoming documentary, Poetry is Not a Luxury, along with poets Jane Hirshfield, Joy Harjo, and Marie Howe. She is cofounder and cohost of “Words Like Blades,” an online reading series that amplifies new work by marginalized emerging writers and their mentors. Franklin is coeditor of the anthologies Braving the Body (Small Harbor Publishing, 2024) and The Big Brutal Act (Small Harbor Publishing, 2026). She teaches in Manhattanville's MFA program and her own manuscript revision workshops.
