Poetry
November 18-22, 2024
Open to All
Tiered Tuition
Reserve My Spot This offering is not currently available for registration. Please check back or email Jennifer Jean at jjean@fawc.org for any questions.
About the Offering
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.
About the Instructor/Moderator
Jennifer Franklin
is a poet, professor, and editor. She is the author of four poetry collections including A Fire in Her Brain, chosen by Rowan Ricardo Phillips for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets (Princeton University Press, January 2027), named one of the most anticipated poetry books of the year by LitHub, and of the fall season by Publishers Weekly and Associated Press. Recent work has been published in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, and Prairie Schooner. She is the recipient of grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Café Royal Cultural Foundation, and residencies from Hawthornden Castle in Scotland and the T.S. Eliot House in Gloucester, MA. She teaches in Manhattanville's MFA program and her own deep revision manuscript workshops.
