Registration required:
Online, 5 sessions / $325
Register
Join internationally acclaimed poet Hoa Nguyen on a five-week excursion into the innovative work of five women poets: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Wanda Coleman, Alice Notley, Cecilia Vicuña, and Anne Waldman. Born on the cusp of societal shifts (1945-1948), these writers defied expectations, experimented with form, and challenged conventions. This seminar is a crash course in their writing and innovative poetics, where you'll be encouraged to write both during and outside of our sessions, responding to prompts drawn from our readings. Together, we'll generate poems as we think and conspire alongside these experimental poets toward furthering poetry and creative expression.
Reading List:
Anne Waldman, Bard Kinetic
Alice Notley, Being Reflected Upon
Wanda Coleman, Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, A Treatise on Stars
Cecilia Vicuña, Spit Temple
Class modality: Online synchronous (real-time attendance required)
Required textbook purchases: Yes
Recorded: No
Writing: Yes
Workshopping & feedback: No
Born in the lower Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington DC area, Hoa Nguyen is a poet and educator teaching writing and poetics at Toronto Metropolitan University and a member of the collective She Who Has No Masters, a project of multi-voiced collectivity, hybrid poetics, encounters, in-between spaces, and (dis)places of the Vietnamese diaspora. Her books include Red Juice: Poems 1998 - 2008 and the Griffin Prize-nominated Violet Energy Ingots. Her latest, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure was a finalist for a 2021 National Book Award, the General Governor’s Literary Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In 2019, her body of work was nominated for a Neustadt Prize for Literature, a prestigious international literary award often compared with the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hoa is the 2024 recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, an Aquarius, and a Fire Horse.
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.
