Poetry
January 15-19, 2018
Open to All
Tiered Tuition
$0-$0 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.
The great poet Etheridge Knight said, “Making jazz swing in / Seventeen syllables AIN’T / No square poet’s job,” but what is a poem that doesn’t embrace its inner music? In this 1 week intensive course, we will look at 5 different ways to make the sounds in a poem more melodious: lines, rhymes, repetition, interior sounds, and exterior sounds. We will read a range of poets who will illustrate each type of music making and will also consider ways in which to implement these types of music in our own work.
In addition to freewriting and other generative exercises, students will be expected to work on 3 different poems during the week: one that is newly generated (based on a prompt), one that is a revision of a recently written poem, and one wholesale revision of an older poem. At the end of the course, each student will receive an email with additional suggestions and ideas related to the work we’ve done together.
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.
