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Workshop Descriptions & Instructors


Faith Adiele
Mary Allen
Kate Aspengren
Thomas Fox Averill
Nancy Barry
Timothy Bascom
Linda Bendorf
Venise Berry
Bruce Bond

Michael Dennis Browne
Susan Taylor Chehak
John Dalton
Thomas K. Dean
Amber Dermont
Kelly Dwyer
Hope Edelman
Josh Emmons
Katie Ford
Patricia Foster
Laura Fraser
Cecile Goding
Douglas Goetsch
Kevin González
John Griesemer
Sands Hall
Christine Hemp
Jim Heynen
Rick Hillis
Charles Holdefer
Richard Jackson
Cheryl Fusco Johnson
Wayne Johnson
Bret Anthony Johnston
Daniel Khalastchi
Zachary Lazar
Carolyn Lieberg
BK Loren
Fritz Mc Donald
James McKean
Gordon Mennenga
Katherine Min
Sharelle Byars Moranville
Michael Morse
Barbara Robinette Moss
Marc Nieson
Shannon Olson
Lon Otto
Juliet Patterson
Anjali Sachdeva
Sarah Saffian
Sam Samuels
Leslie Schwartz
Sandra Scofield
Mary Kay Shanley
Carol Spindel
Karen Subach
Mary Vermillion
Ashley Warlick
Jan Weissmiller
Bart Yates

Katie Ford

The Shape Of Your Poem
Weekend Workshop
July 12–13

“Subject Matters”: Advanced Poetry
One-Week Workshop
July 13–18

Finishing: Advanced Poetry Workshop
Weekend Workshop
July 19–20

Biography

 

The Shape Of Your Poem
Weekend Workshop
July 12–13

Do the terms “dropped line,” “organic form,” or “refrain” bring light to your eyes? Do you like the idea of stealing what traditional forms have to offer without obeying all of their rules? Do you like to write long, winding lines, or experiment with fragments scattered across a page?  If so, this is a goodcourse for you. In this weekend workshop, we’ll learn how the physical shape of your poem can organize, emote, dishevel and please. Looking at a wide array of published poems, we’ll explore how to shape our poems in ways that can open our imaginations and lead us more deeply into a poem’s subject.

This is not a class on how to write in traditional form. Instead, it is concerned with the physicality of words on a page and how a poem’s subject and form can come into dynamic relationship. This is not a workshop. We will read poems, do exercises, and share our work out loud. All levels are welcome.

“Subject Matters”: Advanced Poetry
One-Week Workshop
July 13–18

Historically, the poem has taken up many tasks. It’s been political, elegiac, comforting, and meditative. It’s sounded warnings and wooed the beloved. It’s been a historical witness and a cultural voyeur. It’s been a vessel of memory and a nervous ship that can’t see what’s ahead. It’s spoken of animals and plants, humans and galaxies, valentines and cuisines. In this class, we will discuss a poetic subject each day, focusing on the love poem, the elegy, the political poem, the philosophical poem, and poems about animals. A rich selection of published poems will be our guide, and we’ll do exercises in class and draft “subjected” poems each night according to our theme. This course will have no workshopping in it. However, it is an advanced class, and assumes that each participant has read and written poetry for at least three years.

Finishing: Advanced Poetry Workshop
Weekend Workshop
July 19–20

This workshop will be devoted to studying and refining your poems with masterful contemporary poems as our guides. Revision will be conducted with an eye to the figuration, music, thinking, emotion, and form of each poem. A packet of published work will be distributed and referred to as we work through how participants’ poems can be enriched and “finished,” although it is said that no poem is ever finished, it’s just abandoned. Each participant will have one poem workshopped, and we will have short writing sessions in between so that participants can think about how each workshop session can be applied to their own poetry. A short discussion of how to submit poems for publication will be included, but the heart of the weekend will be your poems.

Biography
Katie Ford (M.F.A., The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop) is the author of Deposition and Colosseum (Graywolf, 2002 & 2008) and a chapbook, Storm (Marick, 2007). Individual poems have appeared in the The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares and Poets & Writers. She has received awards and grants from the Academy of American Poets and the Pen American Center. She teaches at Franklin & Marshall College and lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the novelist Josh Emmons. Their dachshund, Bill, fits in a Festival bag.

 


 

 

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Sponsored by the Division of Continuing Education
Iowa Summer Writing Festival
C215 Seashore Hall
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242

Phone 319-335-4160
FAX 319-335-4743
iswfestival@uiowa.edu

Last updated on January 10, 2008