Hudson Valley Writers Center

“…The poet shows how the invisible is more real than the visible—that the visible is merely a late outcome of an invisible reality that rules us the way the subconscious rules us.  Our dreamscape is larger and rules us more than this waking state.  Beyond the dreamscape there is another consciousness...” --Li Young Lee for Kenyon Review  Feeling mired in your writing practice?  Open to challenging how your poems get to the page?  Join us for a generative workshop where we will cultivate space for the…

Poems can be written, and read, as letters. The epistolary form is one way to put it, yes, but I prefer the term Missive, whose sound holds and delivers a certain longing to the ear. Something is unresolved that needs our attention. There is the hope of a response, but no guarantees. Let's read letter-poems while employing the letter form as a lens for reading work that is both urgent and thrilling in its plea for a reply. We’ll read work by…

This class will be held on Zoom. Login instructions will arrive via email as soon as you register to whatever email address you use to register. Please check your spam or promotions folder and save the zoom link. Please email [email protected] with any questions. Class is capped at 15 students. Kofi Antwi is an African American poet, English professor, and graduate of St. Joseph’s College MFA Creative Writing program. He was born in Brooklyn and raised in Staten Island by parents…

This craft talk will focus on poems by Dickinson, Gregerson, and Sharif. It will explore overt and hidden forms. There will be prompts based on the poems and the discussion. More details to follow! NB: This is not a workshop it is a craft talk and will be taught via Zoom and will be capped at 20. David Baker is a poet, educator, editor, and literary critic.  He was born in 1954 in Bangor, Maine, grew up in Jefferson City,…

Many writers wish they could pick up a paint brush and paint. Many painters express a desire to write. Ekphrastic poetry is part of a long tradition of writing in response to a work of art. From Homer's elaborate description of Achille's shield to today's poets engaging with contemporary art forms like installation and video art, the ekphrastic poem questions, responds to, incorporates, embellishes, and is in dialogue with a specific work of art. The beauty of ekphrastic poetry is…

We are in the midst constantly of the most important, delicate, trying, and carefully scripted negotiations in the history of our time; we are still mourning the ever increasing cataclysm of the dead from the virus. We are facing the climate tipping point. Are you ready for a poem? Are you ready to break the ice, make metaphors on the tongue? Are you ready to eat and drink poems instead of engaging in a heated discussion with your neighbor? Are you…

NB: This is a one-day generative writing workshop taught on Zoom and capped at 15 students. Please make sure to read our course policies page regarding workshop conduct and logistics before registering for any class at HVWC. Scholarship information will be available for this class in November. Richie Hofmann’s new book of poems, A Hundred Lovers, is forthcoming from Knopf in February 2022. He is the author of Second Empire (2015), and his poetry appears recently in The New Yorker,…

Sometimes a poem you’ve been working on just isn’t getting where you want it to go. You might need a seismic shift, or you might simply need to plant a new seed in what you thought was hardened ground. A poem can often be made deeper and more resonant with time and a few techniques. This two-hour craft class will help you integrate and overlap approaches that will help the poem evolve. Come prepared to work (or really play!) with…

Let's write poems together where we use the newspaper, literature, or magazines as resources in which to help generate material. NB: This is a one-day generative writing workshop taught on Zoom and capped at 15 students. Please make sure to read our course policies page regarding workshop conduct and logistics before registering for any class at HVWC. Scholarship information will be available for this class in November. Leah Umansky has been an English teacher for 15 years and has taught…

ALLUSION: poetry as conversation. The late poet Rachel Wetzsteon, author of the entry on Allusion in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, observes that allusion in poetry mitigates our loneliness. How does allusion work to make poetry more expansive yet intimate, inclusive and informative all at once? We'll look at a few examples and also consider participants' work with allusions. NB: This is a one-day Master Class taught on Zoom and capped at 17 students. Slots will fill quickly…

Midrash writing is a modern adaptation of an ancient rabbinic form–retelling some of the compelling stories in the Bible, from the point of view of the characters. In workshop, we start by re-imagining Adam and Eve, then go on to more complicated tales, discovering what they can mean for us today. Participants work at speed—some exercises 1 minute, some exercises 7 minutes—in order to short-circuit mental censorship. Participants read their poems (or pass, if they are uncomfortable reading to a…

There is nothing so beautiful as transforming a poem from a foreign language into your own language. In this class we will work on translating poems from any language into English. We will work on texts already translated, so as to have a comparison text to consult. We will talk about voice, rhythm, style, tone, and diction level; we will learn the pleasure of perusing dictionaries and thesauruses. All skill levels are welcome. If there is interest in this class,…

More than any of the other writing arts, poetry satisfies the imagination through strategic omission, surprising order, precise or unexpected word choices and deep subtext. We read what's implied or implicit in a poem as intensely as we read the actual lines themselves, gleaning more of what is being said by noticing the unsaid: tone of voice, rhetorical style, which topic is avoided or which word repeated; in other words, we read between the lines.  We also read between the…

The course description will be posted shortly for this class. This class will be taught online using Zoom. Login instructions will be emailed on the day before the workshop. Please check spam/promotions filters or email [email protected] with questions. Scholarship information for all winter/spring classes will be available in mid-November. Philip F. Clark is the author of the poetry collection The Carnival of Affection (Sibling Rivalry Press 2017). Since 2015 he has taught at City College, New York, where he received…

Sometimes our best words, lines, and phrases are keeping the poem from blooming. How can we take a fresh look at our writing to find the poem under the poem? Revision can feel overwhelming, particularly for emerging writers, but having strategies and tools for what to do can rejuvenate any poetry project. Join me for a lively conversation on how to revise both new and old work. We’ll do a close reading of poems and examine the aural dynamics and rich…

From Homer to A.E. Stallings, similes play a vital role in making poetry precise, memorable, and vivid. Sometimes, though similes are as much about unlikeness as likeness - as a Homeric scholar has observed, similes can go off the rails.  Let's dip into a few examples of this familiar but underrated poetic tool and see what we find. NB: This is a one-day Master Class taught on Zoom and capped at 17 students. Slots will fill quickly so please register…

Lineation is one of poetry’s foundational craft elements, impacting nearly every aspect of a poem, from how it looks and sounds to what it means. Some of us understand line breaks intuitively when we begin writing poetry; some of us have been told to break on “important” words or where you might naturally pause when reading aloud.  This intensive craft class builds on those ideas to consider the poetic line “a unit of experience,” as Dana Levin has called it.…