What A Sonnet Can Do: A Generative Poetry Workshop with Denise Duhamel (on Zoom)

This is a generative workshop focusing on the sonnet’s traditional form and its ever-evolving, exciting, flexible variations. We will revel in this mighty small powerhouse of a poem and its possibilities. Please come ready to write, experiment, distill, expand, and laugh a little too. Maybe you have wondered—as I have—how sonnet-like must a poem be to be a sonnet? We’ll try to answer that as we look to Shakespeare and beyond—prose sonnets (Harryette Mullen), the "American sonnet" (Wanda Colman and Terrance Hayes) the Seussian memoir sonnet (Diane Seuss), and abecedarian sonnets (Barbara Hamby).  Students will engage with the rigor and flexibility of the form, learning all the sonnet can hold.

Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pittsburgh, 2025), Second Story (2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She and the late Maureen Seaton co-authored five collections, the most recent of…