Master Class: A Theory of Constraints with Reginald Dwayne Betts
Master Class: A Theory of Constraints with Reginald Dwayne Betts
2 Sessions: Saturday + Sunday, November 7 - 8
1:00-3:00pm ET
Reginald Dwayne Betts
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, a lawyer, and the founder and CEO of Freedom Reads. He is the author of Doggerel, Felon, and a few others across different genres, with books in poetry, essays, criticism, a one-person theatrical piece. He has written for the New York Times for nearly ten years.
Every poem is a series of refusals. The haiku refuses everything past three short lines. The villanelle refuses to let go of its two refrains. The triolet, the canzone, the ghazal — forms most of us were never taught — govern more severely, dictating what must repeat, when, and how. This seminar begins with a counterintuitive claim: these constraints, these commitments to not make certain choices, don't narrow what's possible on the page. They reveal possibilities that unconstrained writing forecloses. When you can't say some thing, you discover what you must say. We'll study how this works in forms familiar and strange, reading poems that turn their formal obligations into their deepest sources of surprise.
Then we'll push the theory further than poetry usually lets it go. A form governs six lines, or twelve, or a few hundred — but what happens when constraint is spun out over a 2,500-word essay, or sustained across a 75,000-word book? We'll look at how the discipline of the poetic line scales into the architecture of longer work, how a refusal made on page one can organize everything that follows. You'll leave with a theory of why constraint generates rather than restricts, and a set of practices for building constraints into your own poetry or prose.
Highlights:
A working theory of constraint — understanding what unconstrained writing forecloses and how form leads to an unpredictable (and much needed) freedom in poetry and prose.
Close study of forms familiar and strange — how poetic forms (the villanelle, triolet, canzone, and ghazal) turn their formal obligations into their deepest sources of surprise.
Practices for scaling constraint beyond the poem — concrete strategies for spinning the discipline of the poetic line into essays and book-length work, so a refusal made on page one organizes everything that follows.
This class has 2 scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Sunday, November 1.
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, a lawyer, and the founder and CEO of Freedom Reads.
At sixteen, he confessed to an armed carjacking and was sentenced to nine years in adult prison. He discovered poetry and the law in a cell, and those discoveries have shaped everything since. Across two decades, his work has been one long inquiry into how a sixteen-year-old ends up in prison and what it takes to come home—an inquiry he has pursued through poetry, memoir, theater, photography, printmaking, and film.
Betts is the author of six books, including the memoir A Question of Freedom, winner of an NAACP Image Award, and most recently Doggerel (W.W. Norton, 2025). A Question of Freedom is a prison memoir that begins with Betts's arrest and ends as he walks out of prison's gates. His forthcoming memoir, Off the Cuff, begins the day he was released and navigates his first twenty years out of prison.
