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:
Students will come away with a variety of approaches for the revision of personal essay/memoir, including work they already feel is strong.
They'll get to try out and play with various mechanical drills in service of revision, as well as strategies for forging distance between the self who wrote the draft and the one who is revising.
They will learn how to navigate some of the real-world hurdles one might face when attempting to publish personal essays/memoir/reported literary nonfiction.
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.
