24PearlStreet Workshops
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’s eleventh volume of poetry, Casualty Reports, was published by Pittsburgh in fall 2022; her fifth collection of co-translated Vietnamese poetry, Dreaming the Mountain: Poems by Tue Sy, was published by Milkweed in spring 2023. Her tenth book of her poetry, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award; her earlier books, which have won a number of awards, include three focusing on race and racism (Admit One: An American Scrapbook, White Papers, and Blue Front). Collins founded the UMASS Boston creative writing program and later served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
