About the Offering

“Since when,” he asked,
“Are the first line and last line of any poem
Where the poem begins and ends?”

—Seamus Heaney, “The Fragment”

First and last impressions may not be everything, as the familiar sayings claim, but they are certainly critical in poetry. The first and final lines of our poems influence how our readers engage with them; the beginning is the enkindling spark that causes readers to desire a relationship with a poem, and the ending what inspires them to deepen that relationship by returning to it again and again. In this generative workshop, we will write new poems with a focus on the mechanics of beginnings and endings—on what makes a poem’s beginning alluring and its ending powerful—and in particular on crafting compelling first lines and final lines that manage to be provocative and/or evocative without “trying too hard” to impress. We will read a diversity of poets who adopt different but equally effective approaches to beginnings and endings, as well as do writing exercises that challenge us to grow and improve our own techniques, and leave the course with better strategies for both drafting and revising our work.

Sara Eliza Johnson's first book, Bone Map (Milkweed Editions, 2014), was selected for the 2013 National Poetry Series. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Boston Review, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, Pleiades, the Best New Poets series, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, two Winter Fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, an Academy of American Poets Prize from the University of Utah, and the Philip Freund Alumni Prize from Cornell University. She teaches at the University of Alaska--Fairbanks.