This Condensary: Short Poems with Brian Teare

This class will focus on reading and writing short poems, particularly those of ten lines or less. We will look at the structure of short poems from around the world and from throughout the histories of poetry, including Classical epigrams, haiku, and Imagist lyric; discussing Catullus, Basho, and H. D., among others. Throughout our discussions and writing we’ll focus on the formal strategies—prosody, syllable count, rhyme, alliteration, image, etc.— and the kinds of detail work that allow a successful short poem to grow ever larger in our minds after we’re done reading it. Our goal will be to leave the class with at least five finished poems whose compression exemplifies, according to Marianne Moore, “the first grace of style.”

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, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He’s also published seven chapbooks. 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

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