LIVE via ZOOM: 3pm-5pm (Eastern Time)

In this class, we will read, study, and discuss the craft elements of American sonnets—less structured, more musical, and innovative than traditional Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnets.

We will consider examples by Wanda Coleman, Claude McKay, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Patricia Smith, A.E. Stallings, Lucille Clifton, Terrance Hayes, Ada Limón, Jericho Brown, Monica Youn, Diane Seuss and others—to see the ways these writers have managed to create magic from their imagination, research, or their lives in just fourteen lines. Diane Seuss has said that her Pulitzer prize-winning collection, frank: sonnets is “if I have to say, about life.” All of these powerful poems beguile and pack a punch.

Each day, we will bring in a draft of an American sonnet to workshop and revise.

Louise Glück writes, “Poetry survives because it haunts and it haunts because it is simultaneously utterly clear and deeply mysterious; because it cannot be entirely accounted for, it cannot be exhausted.” Join me in reading and writing haunting, mysterious sonnets.