Walking into the Duplex: A Formal Invention Intensive with Jen Karetnick

Have you always wanted to invent your own poetic form but don’t know where to start? Featuring the duplex, the golden shovel, the sonnenizio, and the American sentence acrostic — all forms invented by contemporary living poets — this intensive breaks down the process of formal invention and reveals the process behind the product. Beginning with the craft fundamentals of prosody, we’ll examine in detail each of these forms and learn how to write them. In the final third of the class, we’ll generate a new form as a group that we can take home and practice before distributing to the wider world of poetry. Every poet will leave with the drafts of four formal poems, the group form, and the seeds of knowledge for growing their own individual forms.

Class meets in person, Saturday, April 12, 9 am – noon

Class size: minimum 5, maximum 15

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Teaching Artist: Poet, essayist, and food-travel journalist Jen Karetnick is the award-winning author/co-author of 21 books, including 11 poetry collections, 4 cookbooks, 4 guidebooks, and more. Her creative work has won the Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among other honors, and received support from the Vermont Studio Center, Roundhouse Foundation, Wildacres Retreat, Mother’s Milk Artist Residency, Centrum, Artists in Residence in the Everglades, and elsewhere. She is co-founder of the non-profit SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami) and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, the only daily online journal dedicated to raising women’s voices. Her work is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Pleiades, Plume, Shenandoah, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. See jkaretnick.com.