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.