My Pronouns Make a Sonnet: Queering Poetic Form

At a time when so many books—including queer books—are being challenged, banned, and burned, it feels perhaps more important than ever that queer authors write the books in which they can find themselves represented and push back against the erasure of their experience. So can queer poets find forms in which to do this? What does it mean to not only write about queer experience, but also to queer form, a methodology of thinking, an entire poetics? What does it mean to inhabit queerness, perhaps, as a poetic practice?

In this creative discussion seminar and writing session we will explore these questions together and study the work of queer authors to generate our own writing and our own queer forms. Readings may include work by Benjamin Garcia, torrin a. greathouse, Saeed Jones, Natalie Diaz, Franny Choi, and Lucien Darjeun Meadows, among others. This workshop will focus on discussion and generative writing prompts, with opportunities for participants to share excerpts from the material they generate if they so choose (without critique). In framing our conversation around form and craft, together we can all learn ways to queer our poetics and our thinking to write exciting new poems.

In the first session, we will explore mentor texts and write poems that queer existing (or “traditional”) forms. In the second session, we will explore mentor texts and write poems that queer “experimental” forms. (And of course, along the way, we will challenge, blur, and queer these false binaries.) By the end of the course, we will not have exhausted the possibilities of ways to queer form, but rather we will have embarked on new ways of thinking about our craft that will hopefully continue long after the class has ended. Let’s discover together in community.