Poetry & Memory
In this generative poetry workshop, you'll write new poems inspired by the connection between memory and metaphor and receive supportive feedback.
How can we connect memory and metaphor to sing our life’s songs? To speak to history and myth? To weave stories into personae that stretch the limits of what we think we know?
In this generative poetry workshop, you will write (or work on) four poems that we will workshop together each week, and we will read and think about poems by Lucille Clifton, Adrienne Rich, Larry Levis, and Vievee Francis.
We will compassionately and thoughtfully offer feedback about the poems you bring to class in this generative workshop. Everyone who brings a poem to class will have work discussed. At the end of each session, we’ll think about the following week’s poem.
At the end of our five weeks together, you’ll have five poems that you’ve been building in a positive and empathetic community of writers. Poets of all levels are welcome, as are prose writers who would like to take a poetry workshop for the first time.
What You Will Learn
Our first class will be focused on craft and honing in on what the techniques of building memory, metaphor and scene into our poems can do. Then, the following four weeks, you’ll generate a brand-new poem using an exercise I provide (or share a poem in progress) that you’ll bring to workshop and that we will talk about.
Who Should Take This Class?
Poets of all levels and prose writers who write (or want to write) poems.
Instructor
Tyler Mills
Writing Institute Instructor
Tyler Mills (she/her) is a poet, essayist, and educator. Her memoir The Bomb Cloud (Unbound Edition Press 2024) earned a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was awarded a Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC Literature Award and has been excerpted in AGNI, Brevity, Bennington Review, River Teeth, and The Rumpus, and won the Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize in Prose. Her poetry guidebook, Poetry Studio: Prompts for Poets, was published with University of Akron Press in June 2024.She is also the author of the poetry books City Scattered (Snowbound Chapbook Award, Tupelo Press 2022), Hawk Parable (Akron Poetry Prize, University of Akron Press 2019), Tongue Lyre (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, Southern Illinois University Press 2013), and co-author with Kendra DeColo of Low Budget Movie (Diode Editions Chapbook Prize and New England Poetry Club’s 2021 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize, Diode Editions 2021). Her poems have appeared widely including in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Republic, The Believer, the Kenyon Review, and Poetry; won magazine awards from Gulf Coast, the Crab Orchard Review, and Third Coast; and been featured in the Academy of American Poets “Poem-a-Day” digital series. Her visual work has been shown in the Piano Roll Project, Bates Mill Complex and published in Poetry and Tupelo Quarterly. She has also been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and her work has appeared in a number of anthologies internationally and nationally, most recently in the forthcoming Poems from Pandemia published by the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland, as well as the Golden Shovel Anthology.Tyler Mills holds degrees from Bucknell University (BA), the University of Maryland (MFA), and the University of Illinois-Chicago (PhD). Her creative dissertation was awarded the UIC Graduate College Outstanding Thesis Award (Arts and Humanities). The recipient of residencies from Yaddo, Ragdale, the Women’s International Study Center of Santa Fe, the Bethany Arts Center, and the Vermont Studio Center, as well as fellowships from Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Tyler Mills teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center’s 24PearlStreet and lives in Brooklyn, on part of the unceded homeland of the Lenape people.