Creative Writing Classes and Workshops
Throughout the calendar year the Poetry Centers offers non-credit creative writing workshops as well as classes and seminars on poetics, poetry movements and individual poets. Taught by visiting and local writers, including University of Arizona faculty, these courses strengthen our literary community and provide a rich opportunity for creative and intellectual exchange. Poetry Center classes and workshops are held in the evenings and on weekends. Course fees support the ongoing work of the Poetry Center and of the teacher/poets.
To register for a class click here to download a form and mail it into the Poetry Center.
You may also register by telephone (520) 626-3765 or in person at the Poetry Center, 1508 E. Helen St.
Checks should be made payable to the University of Arizona Foundation, and are not considered a tax-deductible contribution. A $25 processing fee will be applied to all cancellations. In order to receive a partial refund, classes must be dropped on the first business day after the first class session.
Prospective teachers, please click here for a course proposal form.
Will Inman Scholarships
Will Inman partial scholarships are need-based awards granted to community
members for courses offered at the Poetry Center. To apply, please write a
letter describing your experience with poetry (you need not have any) and a
brief outline of why the scholarship is needed and how the course will help
your literary pursuits.
Address this letter to Renee Angle, Program
Coordinator 1508 E. Helen, Tucson, AZ 85721-0150 or email to angler@email.arizona.edu.
Fall 2007 Classes and Workshops
Experimental Poetry
Instructors: Charles Alexander, Laynie Brown, Barbara Henning, Tenney NathansonMondays, October 15 through December 10, 6pm-8pm
No class November 26
$200
The four poets teaching this eight-week workshop will each focus (for two weeks) on some experimental, off-center poetic techniques for writing poetry. We invent in order to get ourselves into places where we otherwise would not arrive, and hopefully make discoveries and new formulations along the way. Some of these approaches will include or slant away from autobiographical inclusive writing, pantoums, collage, dialogic writing, mixed and cross-genre writing, the visual and written, the elastic sonnet, found material, erasure, chance procedures, kitchen sink poetics, shaggy writing, and swerving toward the new. Following are some of the poets the workshop might read: Frank O’Hara, Bernadette Mayer, John Ashbery, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Paul Blackburn and Phillip Whalen.
Laynie Browne is the author of six books of poetry, most recently, Daily Sonnets (Counterpath Books,2007) and Drawing of a Swan Before Memory, winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series (U of Georgia Press, 2005). Forthcoming is The Scented Fox, a National Poetry Series selection (Wave Books 2007). She has taught creative writing courses at University of Washington and Mills College, and has taught poetry-in-the-schools in New York, Seattle, and Oakland.
Charles Alexander's books of poetry include Hopeful Buildings (Chax, 1990), Arc of Light/Dark Matter (Segue, 1992), Near or Random Acts (Singing Horse, 2004), Certain Slants (Junction, 2007), and several chapbooks. He founded Chax Press in 1984. He has read and taught workshops and exhibited book arts works throughout the United States and beyond. He is the current recipient of the Arizona Arts Award.
Barbara Henning is the author of two novels and seven books of poetry. Her most recent books are a collection of sonnets, My Autobiography (United Artists, 2007) and You, Me and the Insects, a novel (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005). Thirty Miles to Rosebud is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil. In the 90's Barbara was the editor of Long News in the Short Century. She was born in Detroit, relocated to New York City in the early eighties and has recently moved to Tucson, Arizona. Presently, she is teaching for Long Island University and Naropa University.
Tenney Nathanson is the author of the book-length poem Home on the Range (The Night Sky with Stars in My Mouth) (O Books, 2005) and the collection Erased Art (Chax Press, 2005). His critical study Whitman’s Presence: Body, Voice, and Writing in Leaves of Grass¸ (NYU, 1992, rpt. 1994) is still in print. Nathanson's current project is a book-length poem, Ghost Snow Falls through the Void (Globalization). A native New Yorker, he has lived, since 1985, in Tucson, where he teaches American poetry and, from time to time, creative writing in the English Department at the University of Arizona.
“See This? The Parallels and Intersections of Poetry & Photography”
Instructors: Kimi Eisele & Josh SchachterSaturday, December 8th, 9am-12pm and 1pm-3pm
$100
As the well-known collaborations of artists like Walker Evans and James Agee and Dorthea Lange and Paul Taylor illustrate, poetry and photography (and their makers) have long been dear friends. In this 1-day workshop, participants will explore how still images can inspire poems, and how words can inspire photographs. We’ll review the ways photographers make poems with light and how poets use images to bring things to life on the page. Then, playing with pencils and cameras, we will look at the ways that each genre can enhance, antagonize, reflect, converse, or intersect the other. Participants should bring one poem, at least one photographic image (their own or someone else’s) and a digital camera that they know (at least somewhat) how to use.
Kimi and Josh have taught writing and photography together for almost a decade. They’re known and celebrated for their work as the founding editors of 110 Degrees, a youth magazine in Tucson published by Voices, Inc. They’ve also conducted teacher trainings, interdisciplinary workshops, and artist-in-residency programs in Tucson and beyond. While long-time colleagues and co-teachers, they’ve never actually collaborated on an artistic project in their own respective genre before. This workshop will finally put them to task. Prior to this workshop, they will conduct a month-long words and image exchange, which will inform the day’s activities and discussions.
