24PearlStreet Workshops and Events
ASYNCHONOUS with LIVE ELEMENTS:
Sonnets are like those mysterious architectural structures that are miraculously vaster on the inside than the view from outside could possibly promise. The sonnet, a poem of 14 lines and allegiance to a long tradition, is a podium from which to launch an argument, a clearing beneath the beloved’s balcony, a handheld mirror with plenty of scratches, a corral to keep the bad feelings tame. In this one-week asynchronous class (with an optional Zoom reading at the end), students will explore the sonnet through five different modes—rhyme, argument, I-Thou, “American,” and Surprise! We will read exemplary sonnets by Shakespeare, Henri Cole, Terrance Hayes, and others, and write our own sonnets daily. The goal will be to generate 5-10 drafts of sonnets in a week, and to see just how big this little form can be.
Biography
Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of four books of poems, Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey (BOA, 2021); The Trembling Answers (BOA, 2017), which won the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; To Keep Love Blurry (BOA, 2012); and Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems, (CLP, 2007), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry. He also wrote Cradle Book: Stories and Fables (BOA, 2010) and the chapbook Ambivalence and Other Conundrums (Omnidawn, 2014). His collection of essays We Begin in Gladness, was published by Graywolf in November, 2018. Teicher edited Once and For All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz (New Directions, 2016) and Little Mr. Prose Poem: The Selected Poems of Russell Edson (BOA, 2022). He writes about books for many publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The LA Times, and NPR. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and children. He is a 2021 recipient of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.
