Registration required:
Online, 2 sessions / $125
Registration Opens Soon
In this two-session seminar, Yelen will lead an exploration of contemporary poetry that draws our attention to the city—a site continuously transformed by industry, the workday, commerce, various architectures, economies, academic institutions, and histories of war and politics.
Students will read authors including Harryette Mullen, Sesshu Foster, Renee Gladman, Stacy Szymaszek, Maged Zaher, Mirene Arsanios, Karen Brodine, and C.P. Cavafy, and consider how the act of writing intervenes in urban life and vice versa. What “acts of location,” do these authors perform in their writing? How can documents of “beautiful and/or ugly sites” reveal a writerly self? Students will encounter authors whose work interleaves a personal account of writing with sensorial and philosophical accounts of the city—authors who pursue a literary–materialist reckoning of urban life relentlessly. In this seminar, students will attempt a similar pursuit. Participants can expect to read, discuss, and write in roughly equal proportions.
Class modality: Online synchronous (real-time attendance required)
Class size: 8 to 27 students
Required textbook purchases: No
Recorded: Yes
In-class writing & prompted writing: Yes
Workshopping & feedback: No
Ariel Yelen is the author of I Was Working (Princeton, 2024) selected by librarians and staff at the New York Public Library as a top ten best book of 2024. She received a 2023-2024 Creative & Performing Arts Fulbright to Greece. Her poems have been published in the American Poetry Review, BOMB, The New Republic, Social Text, and elsewhere. She's taught poetry at Columbia University School of the Arts, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers New Brunswick, & The Loft Literary Center. As a former editor for the NYC-based publishing collaborative Futurepoem Books, she founded their digital space futurefeed. She lives and works in New York City.
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.
