POETRY AS PLAY

an 8-week generative poetry writing workshop

June 30th - Aug 18th 2025

Mondays, 6:30-8:30 pm PST via Zoom

$800

In this generative workshop, we’re going to explore techniques that poets have evolved to distract themselves from their inner critics so their writing can be less like work and more like play—absorbing, manageable, and full of surprise—even when it involves serious subjects and ugly feelings. We will practice writing techniques adapted from improv comedy, discover what Beyoncé’s melodies can teach us about the repetitions of the sonnet, and experience how concrete nouns can keep a poem moving. We will keep notebooks to net materials for poetry from our own daily lives and experiment with adapting material from genres not typically thought of as poetic (such as advertisements, advice columns, instruction manuals and course descriptions). Each class session will have two parts: a first part where we’ll look closely at poems published by others, and a second part where we’ll talk about poems you have made. Each week, you will write a new poem in reply to a prompt emerging from our conversations. You will leave the course with a portfolio of new work, a new community of peers, and a renewed sense of how to play and why. This course is intended for beginning and advanced writers of poetry alike—and has much to offer also to makers of prose and song and any art where play takes place.

SIGN UP HERE

If you’re interested in joining us, send me a message below and say so. I’ll send you back an email letting you know how you can reserve a seat in the class.

MY BACKGROUND AS AN EDUCATOR

From 2012 through 2020, I taught undergraduate seminars in poetry and nonfiction writing at Yale University. I have also taught creative writing and literature at Wesleyan University, Deep Springs College, the Pratt Institute, Stanford Continuing Studies, the Bard Prison Initiative, the Yale Prison Education Initiative, the University of Iowa, the Yale Writers’ Conference, the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, the Bridge School in Shanghai, and elsewhere. I am lucky to have learned the art of teaching from my own great mentors, including Louise Glück, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Lucie Brock-Broido, Geoffrey Nutter, Langdon Hammer, Fred Strebeigh, and many others. And no one has taught me more about teaching than my students.

The first poetry writing course I ever taught took place in 2002 at the Exploration Summer Program for high school students, which I had also attended as a student in the 90s. Although my teaching since then has taken place primarily at the college level, it still draws its spirit from summer camp-style education—where there are no grades, where we understand that real growth happens when we feel free to play around, explore, and have fun. My teaching style depends on building a personal connection that allows me to understand who a writer is and what they need from me to grow.

You can read the anonymously-submitted student evaluations from my Winter 2025 poetry course at Stanford Continuing Studies here, in which all 17 students gave the class a 5 out of 5. Other testimonials are available on the “Work With Me” page of this website.