Make it New: Writing Against Ritual and Habit with Jenny Xie

“I will do anything to avoid boredom. You can never know enough…never leave the mind quickly enough,” wrote Anne Carson in her introduction to “Short Talks.” This class will heed Carson’s spirit of openness and rich curiosity, and investigate the pleasures of writing toward self-surprise. How do we avoid the trap of self-imitation and reinvigorate our work? How can the strange and the unexpected be a source of energy and revelation? We will begin the course by diagnosing patterns and recurring motions in our own work, and then labor to jostle ourselves out of our usual familiar rhythms. Along the way, we will sample a spectrum of voices, approaches, and forms, and probe them for what they can teach us about invention and discovery. The goal is to try to increase our range as poets, to develop the sensitivity of our ear, and to allow new lexicons, syntactical structures, and tonal variations to seep into our work. Class will be structured around discussion of craft and revision, generative exercises, and workshopping of poems.

Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), selected by Juan Felipe Herrera as the winner of the 2017 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Nowhere to Arrive (Northwestern University Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Drinking Gourd Prize. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in the New Republic, American Poetry Review, Tin House, Harvard Review, American Poets, and elsewhere. She holds degrees from Princeton University and New York University’s Creative Writing Program, and has received fellowships and support from Kundiman, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and Poets & Writers. She teaches at New York University.

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