24PearlStreet Workshops and Events
LIVE via ZOOM: 3pm-5pm (Eastern Time)
In this class, we will read, study, and discuss the craft elements of American sonnets—less structured, more musical, and innovative than traditional Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnets.
We will consider examples by Wanda Coleman, Claude McKay, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Patricia Smith, A.E. Stallings, Lucille Clifton, Terrance Hayes, Ada Limón, Jericho Brown, Monica Youn, Diane Seuss and others—to see the ways these writers have managed to create magic from their imagination, research, or their lives in just fourteen lines. Diane Seuss has said that her Pulitzer prize-winning collection, frank: sonnets is “if I have to say, about life.” All of these powerful poems beguile and pack a punch.
Each day, we will bring in a draft of an American sonnet to workshop and revise.
Louise Glück writes, “Poetry survives because it haunts and it haunts because it is simultaneously utterly clear and deeply mysterious; because it cannot be entirely accounted for, it cannot be exhausted.” Join me in reading and writing haunting, mysterious sonnets.
Biography
Jennifer Franklin
is the author of three full-length poetry collections including If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, 2023), finalist for the 2024 Paterson Poetry Prize. In 2021, Franklin received both a NYFA/City Artist Corps grant and a Café Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Award. Her work has been published widely including in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, and Poetry Society’s “Poetry in Motion.” In March 2023, Diane Seuss chose one of Franklin’s poems for The Academy of American Poets “poem-a-day.” Most recently, one of her poems was included in the eco-poetry section of the Bedford Introduction to Literature (Macmillian, 2024). With Nicole Callihan & Pichchenda Bao, she co-edited the anthology, Braving the Body (Harbor Editions, March 2024). She teaches craft workshops in Manhattanville’s MFA program and 24 Pearl Street of Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. For the past ten years, she has taught manuscript revision at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where she serves as Program Director.
