Experimenting with Lyric Poetry with Megan Fernandes

What does it mean to experiment? To play? To leap into uncertainty? To subvert a sense of form, structure, tone? In what ways can writers experiment with alternative modes of desire, grief, humiliation, or wonder? To experiment is a human and artistic instinct, a curiosity to play in the space of some unknown.

In this workshop, participants will explore writing and reading different literary experiments in lyric poetry and study the particular aesthetic contexts of poetic styles throughout the past century. Participants will write six poems for the class and read work by poets such as Frank O’Hara, Robert Creeley, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Fred Moten, Claudia Rankine, and Bhanu Kapil, etc. This course will sharpen both workshop and writing skills. In addition to reading and writing, this class will ask participants to reflect, take walks, go to museums, eavesdrop, date, write in bathrooms at parties, go to diners at 2am, and dig for material in dynamic places that reorient their senses.

Megan Fernandes is an Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. She is the author of The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books 2015), the poetry editor of the anthology Strangers in Paris (Tightrope Books 2011), and the author of two poetry chapbooks: Organ Speech (Corrupt Press) and Some Citrus Makes Me Blue (Dancing Girl Press).

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