Do It Again: Using Repetition in Poetry with Martha Collins

This four-hour workshop will begin with an hour-long discussion of poems that use repetition in effective and surprising ways, starting with traditional forms that repeat words or lines (and a nod to sounds and rhymes) and moving on to more original uses of repetition. The last three hours of the workshop will be spent in careful discussion of your own poems (which may or may not use repetition: your choice). Please e-mail a copy of a one-page poem that you’re not yet satisfied with to martha.collins@oberlin.edu by noon on Thursday, March 6, 2025.

Martha Collins’ eleventh book of poetry, Casualty Reports, was published in the Pitt Poetry Series in October 2022. Her tenth book, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Her previous poetry books include two volumes of linked sequences, Night Unto Night and Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2018 & 2014), and three works that focus on race…