Craft Seminar: Tackling the Book-Length Poem with Diana Arterian
Craft Seminar: Tackling the Book-Length Poem with Diana Arterian
1 Session: Tuesday, August 25
7:00-9:00pm ET
Diana Arterian
Tap into poetry's ancient form with Diana Arterian, a writer who has published two book-length poems that attend to history, power, family, and politics. Her recent collection, Agrippina the Younger, earned the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award and was named "best of" by Ms. Magazine and Electric Literature. Her first volume, Playing Monster :: Seiche, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was a Poetry Foundation Staff Pick. Diana has also been an editor at Noemi Press for over a dozen years, and is deeply connected with book-length poetry in the manuscripts she edits there.
While poetry began with mothers singing lullabies, the epic is poetry's most enduring form the world over. The book-length poem is the epic's modern mode, harkening to poetry's origins. It allows us to attend to concerns beyond what a single page (or even a dozen) can contain. As heady and exciting as this all might be, many logistical things nettle the book-length poem. How do you make sure it's not lesser than the sum of its parts? How do you manage order? How do you keep a reader interested, even if the collection doesn't adhere to a chronology? How do you excerpt it for publication in journals?
This craft seminar will be a mix of lecture, discussion, and resource sharing. In the lecture portion, Diana will describe shapes and gestures in modern book-length works of note from Alice Notley to Ross Gay to Muriel Rukeyser, as well as her own experiences in crafting such work. Discussion will be a space for people to describe their own challenges, as well as brief prompts from Diana regarding the shape and approach to your work. While poem drafts or a manuscript draft are not required, ideally this seminar will be a space for people to bring burning ideas and questions for a book-length work.
Workshop Highlights:
A space to explore with other poets curious about the book-length poem and interrogate its defining features, spaces for intervention, and how your work operates within that form.
In-depth feedback and discussion as a group to help you refine your work and troubleshoot broader challenges with the manuscript.
A thorough list of notable examples of book-length poems that challenge and expand the form.
This class has 1 full and 1 partial scholarship available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, August 14.
Diana Arterian is the author of the recent poetry collection Agrippina the Younger (Northwestern University Press/Curbstone, 2025) and editor and co-translator of Smoke Driftss (World Poetry Books, 2025), a collection of Nadia Anjuman’s poetry. Diana’s first collection, Playing Monster :: Seiche, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was a Poetry Foundation Staff Pick. Diana has penned the chapbooks With Lightness & Darkness and Other Brief Piecess (Essay Press) and Death Centos (Ugly Duckling Presse), and co-edited the anthology Among Margins: Critical & Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics (Ricochet).
A Poetry Editor at Noemi Press and twice-finalist for the National Poetry Series, Diana’s creative work has been recognized with fellowships from the Banff Centre, Caldera, Millay Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. Her poetry, nonfiction, criticism, co-translations, and conversations have been featured by The Academy of American Poets, BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, NPR, New York Times Book Review, and Poetry Magazine, among others. She writes “The Annotated Nightstand” column at Lit Hub.
Diana holds a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, an MFA in Poetry from CalArts, and has held teaching positions at CalArts, Fordham, Merrimack, and Wichita State. She is the 2026 Lurie Distinguished Visiting Professor at San José State University and lives in Los Angeles.
