Wise Women Poetry Workshop

There is something in me maybe someday
to be written; now it is folded, and folded,
and folded, like a note in school.
     —Sharon Olds, “A Week Later.”

In this course, we’ll draw inspiration from a range of contemporary North American women poets, exploring how they write about the body, identity, desire, belonging, family, language, and inheritance—and how those approaches can open new possibilities in your own work. Rather than defining or generalizing women’s writing, we’ll encounter a wide range of voices and techniques, giving you the freedom to experiment with how you express your own experiences on the page.

Together, we’ll study how these poets wrestle with complex emotional and cultural terrain, and how they use form, voice, and craft to do so. You’ll consider how a poem can hold contradiction, intimacy, resistance, and transformation—and how different writers make distinct choices in shaping those elements. Through this process, you’ll not only deepen your understanding of contemporary poetry, but also discover new ways to approach your own subjects with clarity, confidence, and creative freedom.

The course centers on a different contemporary poet each week, including Sharon Olds, Natalie Diaz, Solmaz Sharif, Anne Carson, Patricia Smith, and Maggie Nelson. You’ll receive an on-demand lecture along with curated materials, including background on the poet, selected poems, and recordings of their work. Through guided discussion and writing exercises, you’ll engage deeply with these texts before creating your own work in response.

Each week, you’ll respond to prompts inspired by the work we’re reading, generating new poems and revising them with the support of a thoughtful, engaged group. This course is designed as a space where you can take risks, challenge assumptions, and explore your voice in a supportive and critically engaged environment. You’ll receive detailed feedback from me on a poem draft each week to help you develop and refine your work.

Who This Course is For

This course is designed for poets of all gender identities with some writing experience seeking a more in-depth creative engagement with contemporary poetry by women.

Learning Goals

In this course, you will: 

• Gain an understanding of context, form, technique and key themes and preoccupations in six contemporary collections by women poets.
• Know how to analyze poems in order to implement and explore their techniques and strategies your own writing.
• Develop or deepen your skills in constructive critique and revision.
• Understand how to work beyond and outside your comfort zone in order to challenge your own habits and limits.

Writing Goals

In this course, you will write: 

• Six or more new poem drafts.
• A new batch of six revised and polished poems ready for sharing or submission.

Weekly Syllabus

Week 1. Arias by Sharon Olds

In week 1 we’ll look at Sharon Olds’ collection Arias. We’ll consider Olds’ radical and rebellious refusal of shame and celebration of the physical body through detailed analysis of ‘Tailbone Aria,’ ‘Aria Conceived in Mexico’ and ‘My Father’s Whiteness.’ In our writing, we’ll begin to tackle or confront uncomfortable or taboo subject-matter and explore memories of particular family members or friends.

Week 2. Postcolonial Love Song by Natalie Diaz

We’ll consider representations of landscape, myth, identity, language and love in this collection by Natalie Diaz, an American poet of Mojave and Mexican descent. We’ll read and analyse the poems ‘If I Should Come Upon Your House Lonely in the West Texas Desert,’ ‘The First Water is The Body,’ and ‘Ode to the Beloved’s Hips,’ before writing odes to the unnoticed or underappreciated, or poems focusing on our relationship to specific landscapes or environments.

Week 3. Look by Solmaz Sharif

Look, by Iranian-American poet Solmaz Sharif, responds to and incorporates terms from the US Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. In week 3 we’ll consider definition, the limits of language, and the juxtaposition of different registers and forms, through analysis of selected poems. We’ll experiment by writing our own definitions of words that feel, to us, inadequate—as well as playing with and responding to euphemisms.

Week 4. Float by Anne Carson

Float, by Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson, is a collection of 22 chapbooks of various lengths. We’ll read and analyse Powerless Structures Fig II (Sanne), Variations on the Right to Remain Silent and Cassandra Float Can, focusing on Carson’s uses of disruption and translation, and her collision on mythic and the everyday. We will write our own reclamations of mythic or historical figures, as well as exploring the boundary between lyric poem and essay.

Week 5. Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith

We’ll focus on Patricia Smith’s discussion of race, identity, violence and resilience in Incendiary Art through analysis of ‘Incendiary Art,’ ‘Blurred Quotient and Theory’ and ‘The First 23 Minutes of the Day Without.’ We’ll look at Smith’s use of voice, time and form in dealing with difficult and emotive subject-matter, before writing poems that incorporate numerical digits to communicate time, or utilise terza rima form.

Week 6. Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson’s Bluets challenges classifications of genre and form and incorporates and responds to a variety of texts and artworks beyond itself. Through analysis of selected excerpts, we’ll think about how Nelson draws on and subverts traditions of ‘confessional’ writing. We will write prose list poems responding to visual prompts, and drafts that incorporate and work in conversation with our own chosen non-poetry texts.  

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