Reading and Writing through James Schuyler's Collected Poems
John Ashbery (left) and James Schuyler (right) as painted by Fairfield Porter (1967).
“Reading Schuyler you will enter a world intensified by his words and their action on your imagination, a world that you will step out of but can step back into at any time and be refreshed.”
In this workshop, we will read and write through Collected Poems by James Schuyler.
Format:
Read, write, repeat.
Workshops are conducted in real time and delivered so you can engage on your time.
Rich weekly written materials, a podcast recording, and an optional video-call feature connect participants.
Each workshop is recorded. First we read and devote the first hour to reading the text. To start the second hour, I offer a set of possibilities: writing strategies, starting points, and inventive multi-directional prompts as inspired by the poems and poetics we encounter together. Expect to generate many poems.
Also provided are supplemental reading materials including introductory and contextualizing commentary, critical essays, interviews, links for further reading, revision tools, and sound files.
Workshops for virtual students culminate in a 25-minute one-on-one consultation with me. For Toronto poets, it concludes with in-class reviews of mini-manuscripts as a community of poets.
History of the Workshop, Cost and How to Join:
This workshop has been called "legendary". Both in-person and virtual students say that this workshop generates poems, provides insight on revisions of older work, and gives new understanding to Poetics. I have led poetry workshops like this one for 20 years. See this interview with me on the poetry of and workshop on Fred Wah here for Poetry Foundation See this link for an essay on the workshop as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series.
ENROLLMENT CLOSED.
Required text:
Collected Poems
by James Schuyler