New Grotto Poetry Workshop

Matthew Zapruder will be teaching an 8 week poetry writing workshop at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto starting February 22nd, going for 8 weeks, details below.

Poetry Workshop

Instructor: Matthew Zapruder
Contact: matthew [at] matthewzapruder [dot] com
Number of sessions: 8
Meeting times: Monday evenings, 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm; February 22 – April 12
Course fee: $455

Description: “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words” — William Carlos Williams

This poetry workshop will have three main purposes: to help you understand your own poetry better; to give you strategies for writing more new work (as well as revising); and to illuminate practices, techniques, and mechanisms of poetry in general. We will do this by reading aloud the poems you have written and brought into class, and then discussing, carefully, systematically and in detail, our various experiences as readers and listeners. Our class discussions will focus primarily on exploration of the choices the writer has made: how the small (or large) machine of the poem is working, what it is doing, what the poem seems to be trying to accomplish, and what further possibilities for writing and understanding it opens, for the writer as well as for us, its readers. As one of the goals of this class is to keep you regularly writing, each week I will give you an optional writing prompt. This course is suitable for beginning as well as advanced students: if you have questions about your participation in the course, please contact the instructor.

Instructor bio: Matthew Zapruder is the author of three collections of poetry: his latest, Come On All You Ghosts, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2010. His poems, essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including Open City, Bomb, Harvard Review, Paris Review, The New Republic, The Boston Review, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Believer and The Los Angeles Times. He has received a William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. In Fall 2010 he will be the Holloway Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. An editor for Wave Books and a member of the permanent faculty in the low residency MFA program at UC Riverside-Palm Desert, he lives in San Francisco. More information is available at matthewzapruder.wordpress.com.