Making Poems

In this class we will, through a variety of playful measures, develop the ability to write poems that surprise both writer and reader.  The word “poem” comes from “poesis” which means “making.” This is a class in poem-making. Starting from the premise that poems are made from words and not ideas, we will move from words, to sentences, to lines. We will come to understand the relationship of heartbeat and breath to pattern and line and so to the creation of the strange linguistic objects we call poems.

Ruth Danon’s most recent book, WORD HAS IT, was published by Nirala Series in March, 2018. She is also the author of LIMITLESS TINY BOAT (2015, BlazeVOX), and much earlier, TRIANGULATION FROM A KNOWN POINT and LIVING WITH THE FIREMAN (a chapbook). Her poetry and prose have appeared in many publications in the US and abroad, including Rain Taxi, Largehearted Boy, Fence, BOMB, The Paris Review, Barrow Street, Crayon, Tupelo Quarterly, and many others. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2002 (selected by Robert Creeley), Eternal Snow (2018), and Resist Much, Obey Little (2018.) She graduated from Bard College and received her Ph.D from the University of Connecticut. For 23 years she taught in the Creative Writing Program she designed and directed for NYU’s McGhee Division, the (then) undergraduate college for adult students. That program was dissolved in May 2017 and now Ruth Danon teaches in the Hudson Valley, where she lives, and in New York City. She is founder of Live Writing, a project devoted to teaching, performance, and curating of poetry and is a member of New York Writer’s Workshop and the Urban Range Poetry Collective.


For any questions, please write Deedle Tomlinson, New York Writers Workshop Program Manager: nywwdeedle@gmail.com

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Stop Making Sense!