Winter Virtual Poetry Intensive: The Sonnet is Dead: Long Live the Sonnet

Join The Poetry Society of New York for a limited-capacity, six-week poetry workshop.
About this Event

Workshop Overview:

If you were asked to deliver a lecture on food (just... food), you couldn’t not spend a good amount of time talking about cheese, right? Sonnets are like the cheese of poetry. Sonnets are so important in the history and tradition of writing poetry, they’re a tradition unto themselves. Sonnets have style, sonnets have sass; they have rules, they have expectations — and yet, sonnets don’t care what you think about sonnets, nor do they always heed their own form, or honor the parameters of their ancestor sonnets. Sonnets are punk, sonnets are Virgos, sonnets are the color mahogany.

In this crash course, we’ll mosh our way through the sonnet tradition. We’ll look at the sonnet’s buttoned- up origins in Petrarch and Plutarch, as well as Shakespeare’s sonnet legacy, and of course the Romantic poets: Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley. (The sonnet’s canonical history is typically and unfortunately homogenously represented.) But we’ll study the past in order to better study the present, examining all the exciting turns so many different poets have taken to get here. The sonnet as we know it these days is very different from its early beginnings, sometimes hardly recognizably a sonnet at all. What’sthepoint,we’llask,inwritinginformifformnolongermeansanything?Toanswerthisquestionandothers, we’ll have to read and write our way through notions of the sonnet form itself. We’ll have to experiment.

We’ll begin each class with a brief discussion of that week’s assigned readings. This will open our conversation and give us food for thought (read: cheese) as we move into prompt-driven writing exercises. We’ll spend the second half of class workshopping student poems. Students will submit their own work for Workshop each week, and Workshop will be conducted on an alternating group schedule. This course is designed to be generative, exploratory, fun, and nourishing for students’ ongoing writing practices.

About the Instructor: Chelsea Harlan (she / her) is a person who writes poems. Her work considers the bittersweet beauty of being alive. (See also: poetry).

Her debut full-length collection, , was selected by Jericho Brown as the winner of the 2022 American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize. Bright Shade is available for purchase from lots of places, best among them directly from APR or from your favorite local bookstore.

She holds a BA in Literature and Visual Art from Bennington College, as well as an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow and a Rose Goldstein Scholar, and where she has enjoyed teaching English and creative writing. She has received artist-in-residence fellowships to the Hambidge Center and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.

Some moons ago she received scholarship to attend the John Ashbery Home School, and she spent one rigorous summer studying landscape architecture at Columbia University. Her chapbook Mummy, written in collaboration with London-based painter Daisy Parris, was released by Montez Press in 2019, and her chapbook Country Music was released in 2021 from Two Plum Press. She received the 2021 Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award from Southwest Review for her poem “Romance Language,” the 2021 Robert Watson Literary Award from The Greensboro Review for her poem “Some Sunlight,” and the 2019-2020 Mikrokosmos Poetry Prize for her poem “Grimaldo’s Chair,” selected by sam sax. Twice named a finalist for Shenandoah’s Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets, her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net and the Weatherford Award (Berea College / Appalachian Studies Association), and she has received perennially generous non-monetary support from the Claytor Nature Center. In partnership with Writing the Land and the Virginia Outdoors Foundation, she is the “Poet Protector” of House Mountain.

She serves as a visiting lecturer in creative writing at Hollins University, assistant director of the Sedalia Center, and co-poetry editor of Raleigh Review. She lives in rural Appalachian Virginia, where she was born and raised, and where she also sometimes works at her childhood public library.