This is an in-person workshop that takes place at Inprint House.
Six Poetic Modes
A poem can behave in innumerable ways. Some poems value incantatory repetition, while others prefer implication and restraint. Some poems relish in lush textures of sound, while others prioritize sharp associative turns. Rather than valorizing one ideal way of making a poem, this class will investigate how poets blend, layer, distort, or altogether reject various techniques.
During the course we’ll explore six poetic modes: profusion, defiance, opacity, association, directness, and maximalism. Each week, we’ll experiment with one mode through reading and writing, paying attention to how poems build, intensify, withhold, fracture, or cohere. Along the way, we’ll develop a shared vocabulary for talking about poems and for recognizing our own habits and instincts as writers.
We’ll look at writers like John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alan Dugan, Raúl Gómez Jattin, Audre Lorde, Edgar Lee Masters, Chelsey Minnis, Alice Notley, Pedro Pietri, Walter Ralegh, James Schuyler, Fabián Severo, Christopher Smart, Danika Stegeman, and Zheng Xiaoqiong, among others.
Emily Bludworth de Barrios’s recent books include Rich Wife (University of Wisconsin 2025), recipient of the Four Lakes Prize, and Shopping or The End of Time (University of Wisconsin 2022), winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in publications such as Harvard Review, Copper Nickel, The Poetry Review, and Oxford Poetry, and she’s a recipient of the Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellowship. She received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and also holds degrees from Goldsmiths College and The College of William & Mary. She was raised in Houston, Cairo, and Caracas, and divides her time between Houston, Texas and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia.
