Kim Addonizio

writer musicmaker maquisard

Kim Addonizio is the author of six poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry, The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. She has received fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation, two Pushcart Prizes, and was a National Book Award Finalist for her collection Tell Me. Her latest books are Mortal Trash: Poems (W.W. Norton) and a memoir-in-essays, Bukowski in a Sundress (Penguin). She recently collaborated on a chapbook, The Night Could Go in Either Direction (Slapering Hol Press) with poet Brittany Perham. Addonizio also has two word/music CDs:  Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing (with Susan Browne) and My Black Angel, a companion to My Black Angel: Blues Poems & Portraits, featuring woodcuts by Charles D. Jones. She teaches and performs internationally

All the poems of our lives are not yet made.We hear them crying to us, the wounds, the young and the unborn — we will define that peace, we will live to fight its birth, to build these meanings, to sing these songs.

-Muriel Rykeyser, The Life of Poetry

LET’S WRITE : THE TURN

Craft/Generative Workshop, Open to All

5 Days Live on Zoom Dec 2--6, 9:30—noon Pacific Time

mailing list/sign up (addoniziokim@gmail.com)

This class won’t just inspire you to write—it will also help you shape your poems in order to release the power and energy of your vision. Sure, our poems need heart, mind, fresh metaphors, precise language, ravishing imagery—but they also need structure. How can you shape a poem about events in the past? What are the possibilities of elegy? How do you avoid getting stuck in mere description? In this workshop, we’ll explore a few ways that poems can proceed, and we’ll jump off from discussing some examples to writing our own. We’ll talk about the concept of the turn, and study how poems move so they aren’t only one note, but also take us somewhere new and surprise us. This will be a combination of lecture/discussion and in-class writing that will inspire new work and give you ways to approach new drafts as well as revision.  You’ll finish this intensive session with some new drafts, as well as useful tools to help you shape your material.

Monday The Turn

Tues Concessional Structure, Emblem Structure

Wed Epiphany and Circular Structure

Thurs Elegy

Fri Retrospective and Dejection-Elation

-Critique groups are currently full. I don’t look at applications for critique groups between sessions, so please don’t send poems or info until you respond to a newsletter or a note here announcing a new session.Workshop Applications: If I haven’t worked with you in a critique group before, please apply with one poem and a brief paragraph about yourself and your writing/critique experience to addoniziokim@gmail.com .

Please understand that spaces are limited, and that I don’t generally accept beginning writers into my critique workshops. My generative workshops are open to all.

BOOks for Poets

FINGER EXERCISES FOR POETS, Dorianne Laux (W.W. Norton)

ORDINARY GENIUS: A GUIDE FOR THE POET WITHIN, Kim Addonizio  (W.W. Norton)

THE POET'S COMPANION: A GUIDE TO THE PLEASURES OF WRITING POETRY, Kim Addonizio & Dorianne Laux (W.W. Norton)

IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND: THE POET'S PORTABLE WORKSHOP, Steve Kowit (Tilbury House)

WHY POETRY, Matthew Zapruder (Ecco)

BEST WORDS, BEST ORDER, Stephen Dobyns (St. Martin's)

STRUCTURE AND SURPRISE :ENGAGING POETIC TURNS, ed. Michael Theune (Teachers & Writers)

POETIC METER & POETIC FORM, Paul Fussell (McGraw Hill)

TEXT BOOK: AN INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY LANGUAGE, Robert Scholes, Nancy Comley, Greg Ulmer er (St. Martin's

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