Five Weeks, 7-9:30 pm
$215 members/$245 others Berkeley
Special “Combo” Package: Take this class along with Alison Luterman’s 5-week “Discovering Your Poetry” class (10 weeks, for the same price as one 9-week class). Just be sure to register for the “Combo” option, if you want the discount. If you sign up for the classes separately, the discount doesn’t apply.
When focusing on the expression of a poem’s essential ideas or sense, we don’t always avail ourselves of all the tools available to us. Sometimes poets resist employing elements of form, technique, and craft because they feel doing so might make a poem seem too “worked” or artificial. Other times, they are simply unsure how to use certain elements effectively. But expanding your poet’s “tool kit” can give you more options for heightening a poem’s impact and supporting its content, without necessarily letting artifice take over.
“Inspiration and imagination are key parts of the creative process,” says David Rosenthal, “but craft, technique, and form can also provide essential tools for sharpening and deepening poetic expression.” In this class, students will experiment with a range of techniques, styles, and formal elements such as sonics, meter, typography, imagery, and figurative language in order to develop and expand their technical repertoire.
Each week you will examine specific elements of poetic craft by reading and discussing examples and conducting exploratory exercises. You will discuss how to apply these elements to varying degrees and effects, and you will experiment with applying new techniques to your own works-in-progress — all within in a supportive, nurturing environment!
David Rosenthal has taught students at every level from kindergarten to college. His poems have appeared in dozens of print and online journals including Measure, Blue Unicorn, Soundzine, Modern Haiku, The Flea, and The Chimaera. He has been a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award finalist, and a semi-finalist for both the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award and the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. He lives in Berkeley with his wife and two daughters and teaches kindergarten and first grade in the Oakland public schools.