Saturday, February 28, 2–4pm (Free 1-day seminar) / Online via Zoom

What happens when we refuse the limits that poetic tradition sets before us? Forms like the abecedarian, sonnet, ars poetica, haibun, and prose poem are often treated as fixed architectures when, really, they serve as points of departure. Drawing inspiration from poets such as Franny Choi, Danez Smith, torrin a. greathouse, Jericho Brown, and others, we’ll explore how knowledge of traditional forms gives us the tools to excavate, reshape, and explore new landscapes with language.

This workshop will invite poets to dismantle inherited constraints and reconstruct new poetic futures through form. Participants will study the inner logic of traditional forms, and then reshape them for their own purposes to create work that moves beyond the expected. Together, they’ll read and write poems that gesture toward the worlds they want and treat the notion of form as material to remix, rupture, and/or reconstruct entirely.