Craft Seminar: Doors and Windows: How A Poem Ends with Ellen Bass
Craft Seminar: Doors and Windows: How A Poem Ends with Ellen Bass
1 Session: Tuesday, September 8
6:00-9:00pm ET
Ellen Bass
The ending must be surprising, yet inevitable.
—Aristotle
When we write a poem we want to discover something we didn’t know before we began. This encounter is at the heart of poetry. And we often find it near or at the end of a poem. Some poems swerve into their endings; others land on an image or make a strong assertion. Some build to their conclusions gradually and others leap. There are endings that feel like closure and others that are less settled. Stanley Kunitz said, “I like an ending that’s both a door and a window.” We'll read exemplary poems from a diverse group of poets such as Raymond Carver, Aracelis Girmay, Ruth Stone, Andrea Gibson, Megan Fernandes and Mark Doty. Along with focusing on their endings, we'll also study how the poem leads us to that ending, as well as examining other aspects of the craft. You'll learn a wide variety of ways your poems can open into endings that illuminate and transform what we know. As Marvin Bell said, “The poem ends, but the poetry continues.”
This class will begin with an in-depth craft talk and then you'll have an opportunity to work with one of your poems whose ending you've been having trouble discovering or are in some way not yet satisfied with.
Workshop Highlights:
You will increase the possible paths your poem might take to reach an ending that is both surprising and inevitable.
You will learn ways to dig deeper into your poems so that the ending you reach is enlarging and enriching both for you and for a reader. The aspiration in writing--and reading--a poem is to be changed.
You'll have a chance to grapple with the ending of one of your own poems that has not yet yielded its rightful ending.
This class has 2 scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Sunday, August 30.
Ellen Bass has published eight poetry collections including Indigo, Like a Beggar, and The Human Line. Among her awards are Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, the Lambda Literary Award, and five Pushcart Prizes. Her poetry frequently appears in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and other journals. In 1973 with Florence Howe, she co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! and she co-authored the groundbreaking, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth. A chancellor emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz jails. She teaches in Pacific University’s MFA program.
