Rhyming and Stealing: Poetry Workshop
Dates: 7 Sundays, Jan. 13 - Mar. 3, (no class Feb. 17)
Time: 7 pm - 9:30 pm
Instructor: David Roderick
Ages: Adult
Genre: Poetry
Price: $475
This class is appropriate for all poets, regardless of experience level or style. Our workshop goal is to help you explore your particular interests in poetry, while giving you a few new concepts and tools to consider as you make your way forward.
One of the tools we’ll discuss is rhyme. Why don’t more contemporary American poets deploy it? After all, rhyme has lyric (and perhaps even mystical) qualities. We’ll study some poems that use rhymes and patterned syllables to great effect—without sounding like Dr. Seuss or children’s verse.
On another front, we’ll explore how to use published poems as a scaffold for our own new drafts. Many of us are timid about being influenced by other poets, but opening ourselves up to influence can inspire rather than suppress new work. We’ll look at how poets riff, borrow, and enter into a literary dialogue with other writers without lapsing into plagiarism.
David Roderick writes the State Lines poetry column for the San Francisco Chronicle. His first book of poems, Blue Colonial, won the APR/Honickman Prize and was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2006. The Pitt Poetry Series published his second collection, The Americans, in 2014. David’s writing has been awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, and the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize. He has taught creative writing and literature classes at Stanford, the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and most recently at the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he was an Associate Professor in Creative Writing.
More about David: www.davidroderick.net