24PearlStreet Workshops and Events
LIVE via ZOOM: 12pm-2pm (Eastern)
Through the reading of published poems, we’ll explore various lengths and kinds of stanzas (from one-line stanzas on) as well as various lengths and kinds of lines. We’ll focus on free-verse poems, but briefly explore the formal origins of various stanza forms and discuss some contemporary forms as well. Responses to daily writing prompts should give you at least 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.
