“Poetry makes nothing happen,” W.H. Auden famously wrote. Some poetry, however, harnesses poetic forms precisely to make something happen. This workshop explores rituals, spells, curses, and prayer in poetry--language that understands itself to be action, language that's trying to make something happen. Guided by the work of poets Jericho Brown, Lucille Clifton, Francisco X. Alarcón, and Ilya Kaminsky, we will consider the possibilities of language as action and make something happen with our own poems.
Claire Schwartz is a PhD candidate in African American Studies and American Studies at Yale. Her poetry has appeared in Apogee, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Massachusetts Review, and Prairie Schooner, and her essays, reviews, and interviews in The Iowa Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Virginia QuarterlyReview, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, bound (Button Poetry), is forthcoming in February 2018.