The Pleasures and Employment of Form: Sonnet, Sestina, Villanelle, Rondeau with Eléna Rivera

Form in poetry helps us to shape language, to channel our obsessions and memories, to give rise to the unexpected in our writing. In this workshop students will study four of the classical poetic forms, reading various examples and writing their own sonnets, sestinas, villanelles and rondeau. We will discuss issues around the importance of form, what it teaches, what writing in a specific form allows for in terms of content, and how forms are subverted and re-imagined in contemporary iterations. This workshop will focus on students’ writing, utilizing playful methods to generate and write in these forms; it will also address the ways that one can utilize assorted constraints as tools for revision.

Eléna Rivera is a poet and translator. Born in Mexico City, she now resides in New York City. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently A Test of Labor (2015), and winner of the 2010 Robert Fagles prize for her translation of Bernard Noël’s The Rest of the Voyage (2011). Her book of sonnets, Scaffolding, is forthcoming from the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets.

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