Master Class: Long Poems Incubator with Sumita Chakraborty
Master Class: Long Poems Incubator with Sumita Chakraborty
4 Sessions: Tuesdays, June 4, 11, 18, 25
7:00-8:00pm ET
Sumita Chakraborty
12 Students
This 4-week writing workshop is taught by award-winning poet and scholar Sumita Chakraborty, the author of Arrow (Alice James Books and Carcanet Press, 2020) and Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at North Carolina State University. Chakraborty has written and published multiple long poems in prominent venues and has presented on panels on the challenges and joys of long poems twice at AWP. Her second collection, The B-Sides of the Golden Record, is in progress and primarily contains two long series and one long sonnet crown. This course combines and adapts elements of workshops she has taught both at NCSU and at the University of Michigan, where she previously held the position of Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry. You are welcome in this course whether you have a long poem in progress already or whether you are hoping to begin one.
Long poems present numerous challenges to the writer who is accustomed to writing, performing, and publishing short lyrics. How do you know when a poem needs more than the single page? How do you approach its structure and pacing? Should you worry about the reader’s staying power? How do you tackle revising it? And when all is said and done: Where, and how, do you share it at readings or publish it?
Our four meetings will combine brief craft capsules and the opportunity to receive oral feedback from one another and from the instructor on your in-progress poems. Each week, you’ll also receive a set of prompts for the week to help guide your writing, with one set geared toward writers who do not have a pre-existing long poem and another set geared toward those who do. The goal of this course is for writers who came in without a long poem to finish with an idea for one, portions of a draft, and ideas for where to go next, and for writers who come in with a long poem in progress to gain additional clarity, vision, and inspiration for their next steps.
Workshop Highlights:
First and foremost: we will have a ridiculous amount of fun
Generative exercises for starting and drafting long poems, strategies for revising them, and advice about publishing and performing them
Get feedback, support, and camaraderie from instructor and peers
2 full scholarships available. For information, please contact Kate Mabus, kate@theshipmanagency.com
Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, essayist, and scholar. Her acclaimed debut collection of poetry, Arrow (Alice James Books, 2020) was praised in the New York Times as an “allusive and witty debut.” Her first scholarly book, tentatively titled Grave Dangers: Death, Ethics, and Poetics in the Anthropocene, is in progress. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2019, and elsewhere. Her essays most recently appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her scholarship appears or is forthcoming in Cultural Critique, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE), Modernism/modernity, College Literature, and elsewhere.
