24PearlStreet Workshops and Events
ASYNCHRONOUS
Does it sometimes feel to you that your poems don’t quite fit in? Are you excited about what you are writing but feel you’re out of step with the poetry moment? Good! This workshop recognizes that the best poetry often doesn’t fit into any easily characterizable mode or period style, but makes commitments as it needs to and uses what techniques it needs as it finds them. You’ll generate new poems and revise your work for supportive, frank, detailed critique by the instructor and group, and you’ll read and discuss relevant work by diverse modern and contemporary poets, with the goal of failing, wonderfully, to fit in. In place of traditional formal prompts, we’ll consider—in magpie spirit, and in hopes of embracing confusion as a way to work towards clarity—strategic, formal and thematic questions designed to provide focus but leave most choices up to you. And while we will likely make plenty of suggestions for specific edits as you revise, the most important revision questions will be: “Who are you? Who do you want to be? What do you want your poems to be?” Poets at any level who find these questions engaging are welcome.
Biography
Daisy Fried is the author of four books of poetry: The Year the City Emptied, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It. She has been awarded Guggenheim, Hodder, and Pew Fellowships. She is an occasional poetry critic for the New York Times, Poetry Foundation and elsewhere; poetry editor for the journal Scoundrel Time; and a member of the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Philadelphia.
