Tuesdays from 5:30-7:30pm
November 4th – November 25th
4 classes

How do poems form a larger work? In this manuscript workshop, we will create a process for assembling poems into a book. Since this is a process-based workshop, our emphasis will be on the transformation that takes place when poems begin to form pairs, groups, sequences, atmospheres, worlds, visions, and reveal new mysteries as they find each other. We will have four sessions during which participants will bring between fifteen and thirty pages of poems. By the end of our time together, you will have the core of a longer work and have developed a way of understanding what your poems do when they move together. In addition to workshopping participants’ poems, we will read all manner of poetry collections to give us a sense of the possibilities of what a book can do.

Arda Collins is the author of a collection of poems, It Is Daylight (2009), which was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The American Poetry Review, jubilat, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Denver. She has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and currently teaches at Elms College and NYU.