About the Workshop

The sequence poem dates to antiquity if we consider epic poems our first great examples. However, the structural gains of the sequence poem as a marker of our age have allowed for all kinds of energies and possibilities of association and narrative complexity. Sequence poems allow poets to meditate upon an event or theme from multiple perspectives and angles through a series of radiant fragments. In this generative workshop, we will spend the week writing a single poem constructed from an open set of lyric pieces that constellate into an “organic whole.”

About the Instructor

Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023). His forthcoming cookbook, A Bowl of Goodness: Nourishing Poems with a Side of Soup, will be published in October 2026. His honors include fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, John S. Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. He is the inaugural recipient of the Patricia Cannon Willis Prize in American Poetry from Yale Library. Major has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and World Literature Today. An elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.