WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

The poet Stanley Kunitz once cautioned us against clichés of speech, but he went on to caution us against clichés of thought and feeling as well. What are clichés of thought and feeling? What are ours? How do we undermine and revise thought habits, feeling habits, and composition habits so that writing (and revision) can become a way of discovering the new?

Come prepared to get a little lost. Come ready to generate a lot of writing. Come ready to destroy what you might have had in mind, so that you might have an experience you did not anticipate.

The class will be mostly generative and will include some in-class critiquing of students’ work, if there is time. During our week together, we discuss various readings and texts. No advanced readings or submissions are required.

REQUIREMENTS

• Please note: this workshop is designed for students who have not previously studied with Marie Howe.
• This is an all-levels workshop.
• Please submit a cover letter that states your interest in this workshop and gives an overview of your prior workshop experience, if any.
• The cost is $675. If you are selected to participate in the workshop, a deposit of $300 is required to register, with the balance due by September 30.
• If you are accepted, you have the option of attending the Keynote on Thursday, January 11, at a reduced price of $150 (we will send you a link upon confirmation). Alternately, you may purchase a ticket to attend the Seminar in full, as it runs after the workshops (January 11 – 14).
• Financial Assistance is available to those who would not otherwise be able to attend—click here for guidelines and/or to apply for a Workshop Fellowship Award. (Do not submit a regular application if you are requesting financial aid.)
• Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis until the class is full.

ABOUT

Marie Howe is the author of four volumes of poetry: Magdalene, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, The Good Thief, and What the Living Do. Her next book New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming in April 2023. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and the Partisan Review, among others.  She is also co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic.

Howe has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Stanley Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. In 2015, she received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement. From 2012-2014, she served as the Poet Laureate of New York State.

Currently, she is a chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, and poet in residence at The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in NYC.