Wednesdays, September 24 to October 29, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Instructor: Rita Magdaleno
Peggy Shumaker and Joseph Usibelli Creative Writing Alumni Room 205, Poetry Center
$150 + $5 course material fee
Registration Deadline: September 17

This course will focus on the personal and political landscapes of one’s imagination. Participants will explore poetry drawn from memory and history—both oral and recorded. Writing exercises will be designed to map a personal geography. Writers will discover language that’s clear, concrete, and appealing to the senses. Each participant will find new ways to draw from lived experience and imagination to create vivid poems. We’ll write a poem in each workshop session. Some of the poets and poems we’ll read: Denise Chávez, Richard Rodriguez, Martín Espada, Luis J. Rodriguez, and María Meléndez.

Suggested text: María Meléndez, How Long She’ll Last in This World. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006.

Rita Maria Magdaleno works as a poet in the schools for Arizona Commission on the Arts. She has taught poetry as adjunct faculty at Pima Community College. Magdaleno’s publications include: Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, & My Mother (University of Arizona Press 2003), and My New Backyard Garden, a bilingual children’s book (2006). Her poems and stories appear in national and international publications: Puerto del Sol; After Aztlan: Latino Poets of the Nineties; Walking the Twilight: Women Writers of the Southwest; Fever Dreams: Contemporary Arizona Poets; and Neueste Chicano Lyrik: New Chicano Poetry. photo by Desiree Rios

Wednesday, September 24, 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Instructor: Visiting Poet Catherine Barnett
Miriam Endicott Emley Room 207 at the Poetry Center
$75
Registration Deadline: September 17

This workshop will present ways to think of revision as a generative process and will provide strategies for mining, re-ordering, and re-entering both early and late drafts. This is a very hands-on practical class for poets who find themselves feeling stopped, blocked, too easily—or never—satisfied. Please bring two copies of two poems/texts you’re interested in working on.

Catherine Barnett is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and a Pushcart. Her book, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, won the 2003 Beatrice Hawley Award and was published in 2004 by Alice James Books. Barnett has taught at Barnard, the New School, and NYU, where she was honored with an Outstanding Service Award. She has worked as a magazine editor and now works as a freelance editor of poetry and poets’ prose. She has taught craft classes at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the NYU Writers Workshops in Paris, and at the Emerging Writers Festival at Franklin & Marshall College.
photo by Christine Krikliwy




Mondays, October 13 to December 1, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Instructor: Barbara Henning
Miriam Endicott Emley Conference Room 207, Poetry Center
$200 + $5 course material fee
Registration Deadline: October 6

New ideas for writing often emerge at the borderline between genres. In this class we are going to read some exciting contemporary-modern writing and look closely at what happens when a writer is able to maintain our interest in a story while at the same time moving away from an emphasis on time toward the space of the page and/or the moment. Participants will read four novel-like poems (or poetic stories) where the author experiments with combining line and sentence and/or image and story. One week we will read a book and respond with some journal writing and discussion; in addition, participants will work together to invent a list of potential writing situations stemming from our reading and discussion. The following week will be a writing workshop and you will bring copies of your writing for the class to read, respond to, and critique. Critical and biographical essays will also be provided.

The books for the class will be:
Anne Carson. Autobiography of Red. New York: Random House Vintage, 1998.
Marguerite Duras. The Lover. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
Alice Notley. The Descent of Alette. New York: Penguin, 1996. Books will be available through Antigone. The Descent of Alette, which is out of print, can be purchased online, used.
Michael Ondaatje. Coming Through Slaughter. New York: Penguin, 1976.

Barbara Henning is a poet and fiction writer, author of two novels and seven books of poetry. Her latest book of poems, My Autobiography , was published in 2007 by United Artists. Two novels, You Me and the Insects (2005) and Black Lace (2001) were both published by Spuyten Duyvil. Other works include a series of photo-poem pamphlets; Detective Sentences (S.D., 2001), In Between (Spectacular Diseases, England); Me & My Dog (Poetry New York, 1999); Love Makes Thinking Dark (United Artists, 1995); The Passion of Signs (Leave Books, 1994); Smoking in the Twilight Bar (United Artists, l988). Her poems and stories have been published in many magazines, including Poetry International, Jacket Magazine, The Paris Review, Fiction International, The Brooklyn Rail, The World, Talisman, Lingo, Shiny, Not Enough Night, Hanging Loose, and others. During the early nineties, she was the editor of Long News in the Short Century, a journal of art and writing.
photo by Lisa Schrempp




October 25 and 26, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Instructor: Katie Kurtz
Peggy Shumaker and Joseph Usibelli Creative Writing Alumni Room 205, Poetry Center
$100 + $5 course material fee
Registration Deadline: October 17

If, as Ezra Pound suggested, “The artist is the antenna of the race,” how do poets rebroadcast the transmission? This two-day workshop introduces ways of looking at visual art and methods of using paintings, sculpture, and photography as springboards for creative composition. Day one acknowledges the long history of mutual exchange between poets and painters by focusing on poetry inspired by art and the artists who make it. On day two, participants will learn how to articulate their individual perspective on art in order to craft thoughtful arts criticism. Readings will be assigned ahead of time to help guide the discussion and students should come prepared to workshop both days (instructions will be given in advance). By initiating a dialogue with art, this course will help students hone their descriptive powers—a useful tool for every writer—and expand their range of inspiration.

Katie Kurtz has written visual art previews and reviews and artist profiles for The Stranger, The Seattle Times, Seattle Magazine, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Art Papers, CMYK Magazine, Flavorpill SF, and others. She also is currently at work on two book-length poetry manuscripts: “Dreamland,” about the atomic bomb, dreams, and love, and “Homestead,” an exploration of gardens and God.
photo by Zefrey Throwell




Reading: Foe by J.M. Coetzee
Discussion led by Annie Guthrie
Monday, November 3, 5.30-7 p.m.
Michael and Helen Dobrich Library of the Poetry Center

Suggested Additional Reading: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel DeFoe

Discuss challenging works with Poetry Center staff and writers from the community in a small group setting. Participants should come prepared to address the craft, structure, and/or themes of the works, ready to question as well as to present their ideas to the group.

J.M. Coetzee, two time winner of the Booker Prize, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, is a master craftsman of literature. Coetzee’s works often address complex subjects that challenge our notions of what the reading experience is really meant to be.

J.M. Coetzee’s vision goes to the nerve-centre of being. What he finds there is more than most people will ever know about themselves, and he conveys it with a brilliant writer’s mastery of tension and elegance.
– Nadine Gordimer

Coetzee writes with a dark, impacted intelligence – the kind that has led critics to describe his books as "obscure" and "difficult" even as they admire the seriousness of his intentions. --The New Yorker

Annie Guthrie is a writer, jeweler and artist. She has received fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and TPAC. She received her MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson and is Associate Marketing Specialist at the Poetry Center.

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Phone: 520-626-3765 | Fax: 520-621-5566 | email: poetry@email.arizona.edu