Craft Seminar: Trends in American Poetry Today with Rickey Laurentiis
Craft Seminar: Trends in American Poetry Today with Rickey Laurentiis
2 Sessions: Sunday, April 5 + 12
3:00-4:30pm ET
Rickey Laurentiis
Rickey Laurentiis is a poet who was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to study light. Her most recent book of poems is Death of the First Idea (Knopf, 2025), which Publishers Weekly called “visionary” in a starred review. It was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry, and is a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. She is also the author of Boy with Thorn (Pitt Poetry Series, 2015), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery award, and the PEN/Osterweil Award.
Each student will pick one modern fixation noticed in at least three poems (and presenting those poems) briefly introduce the idea to the rest of participants, facilitated by Laurentiis.
This class studies the contemporary. What are market values of the poetry world—or do we spit & hiss at such careful calculatization? But what are the dominant impressions, major themes, obvious techniques, tested approaches the contemporary moment holds to the poem? This class will meet briefly to discuss some. You will need to come to session prepared with an iota of information. To have identified for yourself what’s a trend in contemporaneous (that is, published within the last five years) poetry, its urges and itches as an acknowledged fact of the present. Presence is an escaping value and tests our gall, but is all there is in lyric) poetry: the presence of the poet in the poem, even in the unconfessional poem. These trends you identify should seem momentous, monumental if possible, particular to the moment,and need not reveal the author’s personal estimation: you may hate and/or love a trend. Yet come with an editor’s eye: are these trends poetic? noetic? ethical? are they productive or destructive to the promise of poetry’s future? epic? lyrical? Each student will pick one modern fixation noticed in at least three poems (and presenting those poems) briefly introduce the idea to the rest of participants, facilitated by Laurentiis. By session’s end, & after a synthetic exercise, students will leave with some idea of the current moment, & its wills, & its ills.
Workshop Highlights:
What are trends in American poetry?
Are these trends useful for our collective poetic future?
How can we incorporate these trends into our work?
Rickey Laurentiis is a poet who was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to study light. Her most recent book of poems is Death of the First Idea (Knopf, 2025), which Publishers Weekly called “visionary” in a starred review. It was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry, and is a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. She is also the author of Boy with Thorn (Pitt Poetry Series, 2015), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery award, and the PEN/Osterweil Award. It was named one of the top ten debuts of 2015 by Poets & Writers Magazine and a top 16 best poetry books by Buzzfeed, among other distinctions. Individual poems have appeared widely, including Boston Review, Feminist Studies, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, New Republic, The New York Times, and Poetry; have been anthologized in Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers Speak of Palestine, Bettering American Poetry, and Prospect.3's art catalogue Notes for Now. Her poems have been translated into Arabic, Spanish and Ukrainian.
