Welcome / A Stone / Upcoming Courses

Thanks so much for subscribing + Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Welcome to this little space I am calling “Letter News,” a poetry newsletter. Thank you very much for subscribing. I am interested in using this space both to send updates on and invitations to upcoming readings, classes, and events, but I also want to create a small archive of poems and my thoughts on poems. A handful of generous readers have pledged financial support of this project, and I am hoping, by the end of the year, to launch some exclusive content, which might include five-minute lectures, ephemera, and other digital goods and services. I am also hoping, in 2025, to launch a monthly online poetry workshop, and I will use this newsletter to announce updates on that project. But for the time being, this newsletter will be free.

If you were in my Hudson Valley Writers Center class last weekend on rhyme, you’ll recognize this poem, “In the middle of the road” by Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade. When I was preparing the class and chatting about it with friends, specifically about how I wanted to include “repetition” into the definitional tent of “rhyme,” my friend and colleague Danny recommended this poem to me. I love how the repetition creates a relentlessness, an ongoing quality of the event, burning the image into the “fatigued retinas” of the reader. It ruminates. It shifts. It is simultaneously confirming and questioning, exhausted and exhilarated. It insists on remembering in the face of inevitable forgetting. It laments remembering:

If you like the poem, you should watch this compilation (via Instituto Moreira Salles) of readers reciting it, in a different translation, in various languages. What I find most magnificent about these performances, as a compilation, is that it emphasizes the repeated quality of the poem twelve-fold:

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I have two upcoming courses, both offered online:

On Sunday, September 29 @ 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm EST, I am teaching an online course via Poet Camp called “Mutant Genres: Writing Prose Poetry and Poetic Prose.” You can get more information and and register by clicking here.

Course description: In this four-hour class, students will explore the exciting possibilities of integrating prose and poetry into “hybrid” and “mutant” forms of writing, those methods such as the “prose poem” and the “lyric essay” that defy straightforward categorization. These forms of writing allow us to “fetch the bolt-cutters,” in the words of the great songwriter Fiona Apple, and experiment with what happens when we release our grips on the usual parameters of traditional genres. Students will have the chance to closely examine examples of “hybrid” literature written by contemporary authors in a fun and guided environment, with the goal of extracting tools and practices they can use to create their own “mutant” pieces. Students will also have the chance to practice these new skills during the session: they should expect to engage with some fun and generative free-writing and experimentation in real time. This workshop is appropriate for writers of any experience level who is seeking a fun, low-pressure learning environment where risk-taking and laughter are encouraged and welcome. Students will have the chance to share their work with the group only if they choose to.

On Sunday, October 6 @ 12:30 pm - 4:30 pm EST, I am teaching another online Hudson Valley Writers Center course called “The Widening Gyre: Writing on Anxiety.” There are currently 11 seats left, and you can get more information and register by clicking here.

Course description: No, writing poetry is not necessarily a therapeutic process. But in anxious times, we can turn to creativity as a means of engaging dynamically with complex feelings and experiences. In this class, we will explore methods of writing about anxiety––integrating the terrible, speculative powers of “what if” and “what now” into our writing practice. The aim is not to diagnose, soothe, solve, or aestheticize our anxieties but to use poetry, and its unique capabilities, to negotiate with ourselves, confront complex personal/political realities, and “explore the wreck […] to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail” (Adrienne Rich). Students will study poems that speak to uncertainty, insomnia, compulsion, breakdown, and clarity, and they will have a chance, using prompts provided by the instructor, to practice writing such poems themselves. Students will engage both with the tools of free verse and with some given forms and should be prepared to experiment with both modes. (The sestina, for example, with its spiraling form, can be well-suited to writing about anxiety.) This class is designed for poets of all experience levels. Please be aware that due to its topic, this course will address difficult, potentially triggering topics, though students will not be expected to share their work unless they choose to.

Yours, in conversation,

Jane