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Winter/Spring 2015, Writers Workshops,

Teachers-as-Writers Poetry Workshop

Course #2015-109
Saturdays Starting January 24 10:00 am–1:00 pm running 10 weeks
Cost: $45 Instructor: Conor Bracken

Where

Inprint House
1520 W Main St
Houston, TX 77006 United States
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This workshop is full. 

William Carlos Williams once wrote that “it is difficult/to get the news from poetry/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.” As teachers and writers, locating and describing the lessons and wisdom that don’t register as ‘news’ but instruct more deeply how to live is a crucial part of our project, as well as a significant motivator. But how do we deliver these lessons without being pedantic or didactic? And how do we even find these lessons in the first place?

While this class won’t focus too much on the profession of teaching, it will deal with one of its fundamental principles: how to communicate with a minimum of static and misinterpretation. So, we’ll be doing a lot of talking: about contemporary poems, craft essays, each other’s poems and revisions, and why it is we write. With a particular focus on the relationship of form to content and poetical-rhetorical strategies, this class will aim for discovering and writing about the profound within the quotidian, the wonder inside the banal, the breadth within the shallows.

About the Instructor

CONOR BRACKEN’S work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bodega, Harpur Palate, Heavy Feather Review, Lungfull, Mudfish, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the Squaw Valley writer’s conference and Inprint and was a finalist in the Mudfish Poetry Contest in 2013. Originally from Virginia, he’s taught English in France, tested software in Argentina, and is pursuing his MFA at the University of Houston, where he is a poetry editor for Gulf Coast.