Serial Poetics

The serial poem or poem in sequence provides us with a rich opportunity to move our work as writers forward, either as an apotheosis of your work to this point or as a means to push your writing practice into a sense of newness. With manifold means at our disposal to engage with the serial poem, this open tradition of formal, narrative, and imagastic methods can be both accessible and profound, and we’ll be working through these building blocks of craft as well as more advanced techniques, conceptual considerations, and histories of serial poetics.

In this seminar, we’ll take a cross-medium approach, pulling ideas from literary, video, and visual art to illustrate sequences of variation, development, and conceit and engaging with work both historic and contemporary. We will be looking at the work of Joe Brainard, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, On Kawara, Akilah Oliver, Stacy Szymaszek, and Wendy Walters among others.

This seminar is perfect for anyone feeling stuck in their writing, looking to challenge themselves, or wanting to develop ideas for a chapbook or full-length collection of poetry.