Sign up here: http://jonathanfarmerpoetryclass.eventbrite.com/
The Hinge’s newest poetry workshop will be led by poet and editor Jonathan Farmer. It begins on Monday, June 11, and runs for eight weeks. Each session runs from 7-9 on Monday night.
The class will meet at 305 East Chapel Hill Street, Durham, NC, in The Hinge’s Third Friday Party Studio Space.
Class Description:
The critic and poet William Empson once wrote, “You must rely on each particular poem to show you the way in which it is trying to be good.” In addition to helping each poem be good on its own terms, we’ll be looking to discover additional ways of being good–to open up new possibilities for all of us as readers and writers. The core of that effort will be our workshopping of each other’s poems, but I will also start each meeting with a brief discussion of a published poem that seems relevant to the subjects we’re discussing in the workshop. We’ll also try to develop our community with an email forum; each week, one of the participants will share a published poem he or she finds interesting, along with a few words on what he or she values in the poem. Anyone who has time and inclination can then chime in with questions, observations, favorite lines, other poems it reminds them of, etc. Hopefully we’ll be able to help each other as writers well beyond the eight weeks we spend together, sharing new areas for exploration and starting conversations that will continue long after the workshop is done.
About Jonathan:
Jonathan Farmer is a poetry critic for Slate.com and the founder and poetry editor of At Length. In the latter role he has published work by such poets as Alan Shapiro, Elizabeth Alexander, Rachel Hadas, Kevin Young, Brenda Hillman, Erin Belleu and Major Jackson, whose poems from the magazine appeared in the 2011 edition of Best American Poetry. He has taught poetry writing at The University of North Carolina and The University of California, Irvine, as well as through The Hinge Literary Center. Craig Morgan Teicher, the Poetry Editor at Publisher’s Weekly, has called him “the rarest kind of poetry editor: one who actually knows how to help a writer make poems better.” Kimiko Hahn notes, “he doesn’t revise the work, he leads the writer to draw her/his own conclusions. He opens up possibilities. That is what revision is all about, and this what expert teaching can do.” And Joanna Klink has written, ”He has an uncanny knack for stepping into the world of a poem and making sense of what would happen there. With an exquisite ear, a wide heart, and an intuition for the extravagance of language, he helps poetry be what it is: the speech of what is most possible and most true.”
Sign up here: http://jonathanfarmerpoetryclass.eventbrite.com/
