Registration required:
Online, 5 sessions / $325 (members take 10% off)
Register
In this crash course, we'll come together to discuss five poetry collections that explore solitude, survival, and loss. We'll discuss when and how poets take a singular experience of aloneness and turn it outward to become something common and shared; we'll also discuss how and when poets represent fundamental isolation and unknowability and, in doing so, establish privacy and distance from their readers.
Class will consist of serious critical discussion of primary texts (below) and some in-class exercises and experiments. Students will also receive generative take-home prompts.
Crash Course seminars require outside reading of assigned texts. After enrolling, students should plan to access (purchase or borrow) the following texts in time to read them ahead of class sessions. Enrolled students should join the first session having read Bernadette Mayer’s Works and Days.
Reading List:
- Bernadette Mayer, Works and Days [BUY]
- Prageeta Sharma, Grief Sequence [BUY]
- Franz Wright, Axe in Blossom [BUY]
- CA Conrad, While Standing in Line for Death [BUY]
- Claudia Rankine, Don't Let Me Be Lonely [BUY]
Class modality: Online synchronous (real-time attendance required)
Class size: 8 to 25 students
Required textbooks: Yes
Recorded: No
In-class & prompted writing: Yes
Workshopping & feedback: No
Natalie Shapero’s latest book is Stay Dead, published in the US by Copper Canyon Press and in the UK by Out-Spoken Press. Stay Dead was longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Natalie’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is the author of the previous poetry collections Popular Longing, Hard Child, and No Object, and she has performed at The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at UC Irvine.
A limited number of need-based scholarships are available to cover the enrollment costs of Poetry Society classes. To receive and fill out a scholarship survey, email parker@poetrysociety.org.
