Poet-in-Residence: Interrupting The Master Forms
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” —Audre Lorde Sonnet
Villanelle. Blank Verse. Iambic Pentameter. These, among other structures, are considered the apex of poetry without regard to the work of BIPOC, queer and trans people, disabled people, and other marginalized groups. How can writers learn and employ these forms with the express purpose of undermining them and the white supremacy they carry in their literary Trojan Horse?
In this seven-week class we will learn how to write in the forms above while doing our best to destroy and disrupt them. We will spend half the class writing in established forms and poetic structures, and the other half creating new forms. We will read Patricia Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Terrance Hayes, Monica Youn, William Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, Claude McKay, Rita Dove, Tyehimba Jess, and other poets who are writing with and against inherited forms.
Cyrée Jarelle Johnson (he/him) is a poet and writer from Piscataway, NJ. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Boston Review, WUSSY, The Wanderer, Vice, Rewire News, The Root, and Nat. Brut among other publications. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University with support from Davis Putter Scholarship Fund.
SLINGSHOT, his first collection of poetry, won a 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry, and is available now from Nightboat Books. Development of the work was supported by Astraea Foundation’s Global Arts Fund, Culture/Strike Climate Change and Environmental Justice Fellowship, and the Rewire News Disabled Writers Fellowship. He is a recipient of a 2020 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from Poetry Foundation, and is the inaugural Brooklyn Public Library Poet-In-Residence.
The Poet-in-Residence is made possible by the Academy of American Poets with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” —Audre Lorde Sonnet
Villanelle. Blank Verse. Iambic Pentameter. These, among other structures, are considered the apex of poetry without regard to the work of BIPOC, queer and trans people, disabled people, and other marginalized groups. How can writers learn and employ these forms with the express purpose of undermining them and the white supremacy they carry in their literary Trojan Horse?
In this seven-week class we will learn how to write in the forms above while doing our best to destroy and disrupt them. We will spend half the class writing in established forms and poetic structures, and the other half creating new forms. We will read Patricia Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Terrance Hayes, Monica Youn, William Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, Claude McKay, Rita Dove, Tyehimba Jess, and other poets who are writing with and against inherited forms.
Cyrée Jarelle Johnson (he/him) is a poet and writer from Piscataway, NJ. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Boston Review, WUSSY, The Wanderer, Vice, Rewire News, The Root, and Nat. Brut among other publications. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University with support from Davis Putter Scholarship Fund.
SLINGSHOT, his first collection of poetry, won a 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry, and is available now from Nightboat Books. Development of the work was supported by Astraea Foundation’s Global Arts Fund, Culture/Strike Climate Change and Environmental Justice Fellowship, and the Rewire News Disabled Writers Fellowship. He is a recipient of a 2020 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from Poetry Foundation, and is the inaugural Brooklyn Public Library Poet-In-Residence.
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