2023 Summer Workshops

Matthew Olzmann The Wonders of Distraction: A Poetry Workshop August 4 to August 9, 2019 Tuition: $650 Workshop: 9am-12pm Discipline: Poetry OPEN TO ALL On-site Housing NOT Available - Off-site Housing Options

This workshop is part of our Poetry Festival.

This class will look at moments of distraction, digression, unexpected juxtapositions and idiosyncratic leaps of thought. We’ll examine the ways these shifts in focus can generate surprise and create resonant turns. For the highly distracted poet, this might be a class on how to harness that disarray into something workable. For the poet with a more disciplined attention span, this could be a session on how to bring a greater degree of flexibility and play into the writing. What was I talking about? Wait. I remember! This will be a generative class. We’ll write and workshop new poems.

Biography

Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route and two previous collections of poems, Mezzanines and Contradictions in the Design. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, and Kundiman, Olzmann's poems have appeared in the New York Times, Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prizes, New England Review and elsewhere. He teaches at Dartmouth College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.