Poetry
February 8, 2026
Open to All
Tiered Tuition
$75-$200 Reserve My Spot
Sunday, February 8th (for two hours TBD)
Music is the metronome inside every memorable poem—the cadences that carry a reader from the familiar to the magical. As poet and music maker Etheridge Knight famously haikued, “Making jazz swing in / Seventeen syllables AIN’T / No square poet’s job.” That swing Knight talked about comes from countless sonic sources: rhyme, assonance, consonance, repetition, and the unexpected textures that happen when the music inside words won’t keep quiet.
In this two-hour session, we’ll explore three distinct strategies for deepening your poem’s musicality. We’ll listen closely to poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Yusef Komunyakaa, Patricia Smith, and others—poets who use music as a time signature and propulsion, as guide and offering. Please bring your notebook and a few poems in progress. We’ll fold in some short, generative exercises into our discussion, giving you space to try out these new approaches in real time. My hope is that you leave our session with new ideas about prosody and a few fresh ways to let musicality turn your poems all the way up to 11.
Open to folks at every level.
Adrian Matejka is the author of The Devil’s Garden which won the New York / New England Award and Mixology, a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. His third collection, The Big Smoke, was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was also a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His other collections include Map to the Stars and Somebody Else Sold the World. Forthcoming in 2026 is Be Easy: New and Selected Poems.
His mixed media collaboration with Nicholas Galanin and Kevin Neireiter inspired by Funkadelic, Standing on the Verge & Maggot Brain (Third Man Books), was published in 2021. His most recent collection of poems, Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin, 2021), was a finalist for the UNT 2022 Rilke Prize and the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. His first graphic novel Last On His Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century was published in February 2023 by Liveright.
Among Matejka’s other honors are the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, the Julia Peterkin Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and a Simon Fellowship from United States Artists. He served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018-19. He currently lives in Chicago and is Editor of Poetry magazine.
