Room to Move: The Long Poem with Brian Teare

This class will focus on reading and writing the chapbook-length long poem, and the unique challenge posed by structuring a longer poem will be a focal point throughout our close readings and workshops. For the first four weeks participants will look at select sequences and series, narratives and meditations, documentary poems and procedural works. Through close reading, discussion, writing assignments and exercises they will then explore together some of the formal and thematic possibilities that arise when poets move into the amplitude only the longer poem offers. During the final two weeks of the class the group will workshop drafts-in-process, the goal being for each student to leave the class with a workable draft of a 15-20 page poem.

Brian Teare is the author of four full-length books, The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, the Lambda-Award-winning Pleasure, and Companion Grasses. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, he’s now an Assistant Professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Class Registration Guidelines
Open to all; no applications needed but registration is required; call (212) 431-7920 x2832 or email classes@poetshouse.org