You can register for classes at our website by downloading and completing a registration form, over the phone by calling (520) 626-3765, or in person at the Poetry Center reception desk. Checks should be made payable to the University of Arizona Foundation and are not considered a tax-deductible contribution. A $25 processing fee will be applied to all cancelled registrations.
In order to receive a refund for a dropped class, you must drop the class on the first business day after the first class.
Prospective teachers, please click here for a course proposal form.The Will Inman partial scholarship is a need-based award granted to community members to help pay tuition for a Poetry Center class or workshop.
Four awards are given each year: two awards of $75 each for the fall semester, and two awards of $75 each for the spring semester. Scholarships are not available for classes offered during the summer session.
Who is eligible
Any community member, with the exception of Poetry Center employees, volunteers, and interns, is eligible to apply. You do not need to be enrolled in a Poetry Center class or workshop when you apply for the workshop, but the scholarship must be used during the semester for which it was awarded, for the course specified in your application.
How to apply
To apply for the Will Inman scholarship, submit a letter and a short writing sample.
The letter should include the following information:The short writing sample should be no more than three pages in length. You are welcome to submit an excerpt.
Submit your application to Cybele Knowles, Events Coordinator, UA Poetry Center, 1508 East Helen Street, Tucson, Arizona 85721–0150, or email knowles@email.arizona.edu.
When to apply
Deadlines for scholarship applications are firm. No applications will be considered after the deadline.
For Fall 2009 courses: August 28, 2009
Award notification: September 4, 2009
This is a craft class in surrealist writing. We will not write “poetry” exclusively, because to limit the medium would only negate the expansive attitude the early Surrealists worked so hard to encourage. In his “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924), André Breton wrote that the imagination knows no bounds, but that we are nearly always engaged in actions that limit it. This class works to reverse the process, to “unfurl the flag of the imagination” and produce the strangest and maddest pieces of art and writing possible, in order “to express, either verbally, or in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought.”
We will read and discuss key texts such as the major manifestos of the early Surrealists, and early iconic poetic and dramatic formations by writers such as Breton, Tristan Tzara, Benjamin Péret, Robert Desnos, Henri Michaux, and others. We will also watch an early Surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou, and look at some early Surrealist sculpture and painting. However, all of our looking into Surrealism’s past will be done to illumine and inspire us to create our own imaginative works.
Exercises will include, but not be limited to: collaborative poetry and drawing, written responses to visual art, reading and writing of short dramatic scenes, extensive automatic writing projects, postcards to nowhere, and building dream sculptures. This course is open to writers and artists of every kind and skill level.
Matthew Rotando has received an MFA from the City University of New York (Brooklyn College) and a Fulbright Foundation grant. Next fall he will receive a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Arizona. He is the author of a collection of poems entitled The Comeback’s Exoskeleton (UpSet Press, 2008), and is a member of POG, a collective of artists and poets in Tucson, Arizona.
Spring 2009 classes
Fall 2008 classes
Spring 2008 classes
