I’m trilled to be teaching this Grackle & Grackle Poetry Knockout session with my dear friend, Jason Schneiderman!
https://grackleandgrackle.com/product/knockoutw22-2/
Grackle and Grackle’s Poetry Knockout series brings some of the country’s favorite, award-winning poets in to teach advanced poetry students, via Zoom. In this topical Knockout, Jason and Jennifer will alternate each session for four weeks as we explore the soliloquy through readings, discussion, workshops, and in-class generative exercises. Before class begins, students will receive poems for the first night’s discussion. Starting the second week, class will commence with workshopping new poems, written during the previous week, based on ideas and prompts discussed in class. Poems for Wednesday workshops are due on Monday prior, noon CT.
This is will be an advanced class, open to poets who have taken multiple writing classes already. Please email Miah at G&G if you have any questions about it.
About The Soliloquy, The Class & The Poets
A soliloquy is a special kind of monologue, delivered by an actor in the absence of the other characters. The conceit is that the character is alone, and therefore can tell the truth, but guess what, audience, you’re right there. And chances are, if a character needs a soliloquy, their obligation to truth and their internal motivations are at odds.
In poetry, the soliloquy spurs the speaker to make a case—both to themselves and to their overhearing audience. In crafting this internal argument, the poet is spurred to risky thoughts, dizzying extrapolations, and exploration of the subconsciousness’ endless catacombs. Soliloquies hand us new tools: contradictions, clashing vernacular—and because no one (with the exception of psychopaths) sounds like Shakespeare in their own heads—inarticulateness, and even animal sounds (see Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”). When we untether ourselves from sense, context, and resolution, exciting things start to happen as the lines of trust, truth, and voice are crossed and remixed.
Jason Schneiderman is the author of four books of poems, most recently Hold Me Tight (Red Hen 2020). He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford UP 2016). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies; he is a longstanding co-host of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile. His awards include the Shestack Award and a Fulbright Fellowship. He is an Associate Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
First four Wednesday Evenings in March
with Jennifer Knox & Jason Schneiderman
March 2-23 // 5:30-8:30 Central
$200.00