Form (fear, flaw, flight, fight) and Function

A combination generative and workshop-based course.

In this workshop we will explore how to best turn our deepest lived truths into the strongest and most resilient possible art. This work is about re-learning how to see, how to listen to ourselves. It’s about psychologies, trauma, imaginative leaps, complex and contradictory feelings, histories personal/political, and about voice: how to find the poetic forms—which are ways—to speak what must be said. How to find the ways to say it powerfully, with as much beauty as we can find.

Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Octopus Museum (Knopf 2019). 2012’s Our Andromeda was a New York Times’ 100 Notable Book, a finalist for the Griffin International Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Prize. She received a 2018 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The Nation, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark and lives in Verona, New Jersey.