Craft Seminar: On Juxtaposition with Jenny Johnson
Craft Seminar: On Juxtaposition with Jenny Johnson
2 Sessions: Saturday + Sunday, January 18 + 19
12:00-2:00pm ET
Jenny Johnson
20 students
Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, BOMB Magazine, and The New York Times. Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship, and a NEA Fellowship. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop.
One way to add tension to a draft is to experiment with contrasting impulses. In this two-part craft class, we will study poems that use juxtaposition to draw unexpected parallels, complicate relationships and power dynamics, expand a poem’s lyric universe, and hold space for paradox, simultaneity, and contradictions. We will consider poems by Arthur Sze, Mosab Abu Toha, Jessica Tanck, Kinsale Drake, and Robert Wood Lynn. You will also be prompted to get a start on a poem that places two unlikely subjects side by side, just as Robert Wood Lynn does in his series “Elegies for Fire and Oxycodone.”
Workshop Highlights:
Practice observing for contrast as a part of your daily notebook practice
Close read for words, images, and ideas juxtaposed in poems
Generate new poetry that places unlikely subjects side-by-side
One full and one partial scholarship available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, February 10.
Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet, published by Sarabande Books in 2017.
In both their lyrical force and breathtaking formal sophistication, her poems are powerful meditations on love, the body, queer culture and identity, vulnerability and community. Featured in both the New York Times and by the Academy of American Poets In Full Velvet was one of the most highly praised collections of 2017.
Johnson’s honors include a 2015 Whiting Award and a 2016-17 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. She has also received awards and scholarships from the Blue Mountain Center, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, New England Review, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere.
