About the Offering

March 30th-April 3rd from 3pm-5pm (Eastern)

What is an epistolary poem? As Edward Hirsch writes in A Poet’s Glossary, it is a “letter poem… addressed to a specific person and written from a specific place, which locates it in time and space. It imitates the colloquial familiarity of a letter, though sometimes in elaborate forms. Some are addressed to those long dead, others to contemporaries. But unlike an actual letter, the letter poem is never addressed to just its recipient; it is always meant to be overheard by a third person, a future reader.”

In this generative workshop, we will read some memorable epistolary poems and, through a series of prompts, write drafts of our own—or, “letters to the world” as Emily Dickinson called her poems. We will start the class by reading an excerpt of one of Dickinson’s three “Master Letters.” We will read also read work by Lucie Brock-Broido, Jessica Cuello, Victoria Chang, Kazim Ali, Kim Addonizio, Matthew Olzmann, Oliver de la Paz, Jennifer Martelli, Marcus Wicker, Lucille Clifton, Carolyn Forche, Paisley Rekdal, Frank O’Hara, and Evie Shockley.

This workshop is open to poets at every level.