Brian Tierney: Making Poetry out of Our Lives – A Poetry Workshop

5 Wednesdays, April 5 – May 3, 7-9:30pm   
$275 members/$295 non-members 

“Reading and writing poetry have long been occasions for self-exploration,” says instructor Brian Tierney. “Poems uncover and recover; they engage memory and personal history, bringing them back to life with new meanings and new understandings; they express intimate feelings and, sometimes, tell stories. In short, all poetry is informed by life and identity. Only you can write like you, and that is what poets must nurture.”

In this class, we will journal on topics and poems discussed in the first class meetings as a way to come to poetry as an observer, as well as an aspiring writer. Then we’ll explore how poetic craft informs our autobiographical impulses, looking at the essential roles that word choice, perspective, narrative, and sound play in the making of a poem. We will write several poems with an eye toward revising, and we’ll read poets such as Philip Levine, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sylvia Plath who use their personal experiences as material for their work.

“By the end of the five weeks,” says Brian, “we will have broken through some of the challenges of making poetry from our personal lives. We will also more fully understand ourselves and our experiences through the reading and writing of poems.” All writers and voices are welcome.

Brian Tierney is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University. He is a graduate of the Bennington College’s MFA Writing Seminars, and holds a BA in English and Journalism, as well as an MA in Literature, from Duquesne University, where he was a teaching fellow and, later, an adjunct instructor in Literature and Composition. Brian’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming in: Kenyon Review, FIELD, Poetry Northwest, Gettysburg Review, Best New Poets, AGNI, Ninth Letter, The Rumpus, and others. In 2013, Narrative magazine named him among its “30 Below 30” emerging writers.