2 Sessions: Saturdays, January 25 + February 1
2:00-3:00pm ET
Rickey Laurentiis

Rickey Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to care. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College where she read Latin, Literature & Theory, and Washington University in St Louis, where received an MFA.. Their debut book, Boy with Thorn, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and finalized for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She’s partnered with the Carnegie Museum of Art and lead a conversation at the Museum of Modern Art. Fellowships from the Lannan Literary Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem and the Whiting Foundation have honored her, and she was inaugural fellow at Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh. Her anticipated, second collection, Death of the First Idea, is forthcoming from Knopf (2025).

This class studies the relationship between the various ways a poem offers or constructs meaning — that is, "makes sense" — and the tactics it uses to literally embody that meaning, via the line, sentence and verbs. About this "making sense," we'll consider it in at least three ways: first, as any of those deliberate moments commonly called the image that gesture, relate to or otherwise awaken the body's five senses; second, as that overall moving, if transforming, logic or "sense" of identity or argument that drives the poem; and, lastly, as sensibility, not just the poem’s atmosphere, tone or stylistic tics but the poet's as well. Along with each, we’ll labor to see specifically how syntax (sentence structure, length, deployment, verbiage, meter and more) underwrites, enacts or, even, subverts or queers what sense is available in the poem. In short, we'll reveal, if not collapse, that ground which sits between "subject" (identity) and "form" (body) in both our own work and the work of a selection of published poets.