POETRY SCHOOL
A Workshop in Poetic Movements
taught by Cleaver Senior Poetry Editor Claire Oleson
Saturday, June 4—Saturday, July 9
Asynchronous with optional Zoom sessions on June 18 and 25 at 11 am ET
Final Zoom reading July 9 at 11 am ET
$250
Have you wanted to dive into the history of American poetry while keeping a focus on your own work? In this course, we will tour poetic schools throughout (mostly) American history, extracting their stylistic staples to apply to our own creative work.
Each week will feature a new school of poetry, from the sweeping metric slopes of Romanticism to the varying, slippery concept of contemporary poetry. The goal of this course is to both expose writers to a large swath of styles and poets as well as encourage them to find their own voice as they consciously adopt the tools and talents of the histories we move through.
At its core, this course juggles two things: providing an education and creating space for a generative workshop. At the end of the day, we are centered on the participants’ work, using the tour of poetic schools as a spine to encourage us to press our usual boundaries and bring intentionality and awareness to our own language, voice, and style. The workshop model will facilitate constructive responses from both peers and the instructor. Particular attention will be placed on adopting elements and tactics gleaned from different poetic historical moments while still preserving the inherent perspective of the participants as contemporary writers.
The two optional zoom class sessions will be used to focus on schools of poetry that invest in elements such as meter and performance: spaces that truly demand sound for full engagement.
The readings will be brief but rich, with the intent of inviting multiple re-readings, close readings, note-taking and flexibility for everyone’s lives and work. Supplemental reading will be available for those hungry for more plums from the proverbial icebox. Prompts will be provided inspired by the week’s reading, but will be designed more as springboards for beginning rather than hard-and-fast regulations. Work will be submitted weekly for peer and instructor review. One piece will be chosen by the student for revision for the final class. We welcome both new and experienced writers looking for motivation, structure, and constructive criticism.
A final optional Zoom meeting will be held as a reading of our work. This will be a veritable museum showcase!
Instructor Bio
Claire Oleson is a queer writer and 2020 Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction. Her work has been published by the Kenyon Review online, the University of Kentucky’s graduate literary journal Limestone, the LA Review of Books, and Newfound Press, among others. She is the 2019 winner of the Newfound Prose Prize and the Poetry Editor at Cleaver Magazine. Her chapbook, Things from the Creek Bed We Could Have Been, debuted May, 2020.
SYLLABUS
1: Introductions: What’s School? I have a Confession…
We will open with an investigation of what is meant by a “school” or movement in poetic history. We will start with the Confessionalist movement of Post-War 20th century America. This school offers us a nice lean in: a clear identifiable style with a great deal of internal variation and a warm invitation to write sincerely about the self.
2: The Imagist Movement
This week, we will dive into writing that borrows inspiration from image. This movement is usually identified as originating in the U.S. and Europe around the 1910s and is nestled into the larger Modernist tradition. We will be invited to consider how language operates to create a picture and how that picture can function as a communicator in and of itself.
3: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry
In a sharp left turn, this module will explore writing the writing of the Language movement. Born in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s, this movement leans away from the figurative and imagistic and promotes language as itself. This movement also focuses on the reader’s participation in the creation of meaning.
4: The Beat Generation
With fundamental influences from the Romantic movement, this school is firmly rooted in a tumultuous moment in American history from post WWII to the 1970s. This style is characterized by a rejection of narrative forms, explicit embraces of the human condition, and a fearlessness in the face of obscenity.
5: A New School but not The New School
In this final module, we will take a look at some stylistically innovative contemporary writers and participants will be asked to craft their own “school” or “movement” of poetry, communicate its identifiable features and ethos, and edit a poem previously submitted for the class to illustrate the style and voice they are presenting.
ZOOM 1: The Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word: Poetry as an Oral form In American History
ZOOM 2: Romantic Poetry (Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries) the Defining Forms
Schedule (June 4- July 9)
New Modules posted on Mondays,
Pieces due by Friday, 11:59.
Feedback from All Due by Sunday, 11:59
Zoom sessions on Saturdays at 11 AM
- One on June 18 and one on June 25
- Final zoom reading: July 9
Kristen Martin is working on a narrative nonfiction book that deconstructs myths of American orphanhood for Bold Type Books. Her writing has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, NPR Books, The Baffler, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Believer, Bookforum, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and the Università degli Scienze Gastronomiche in Italy, where she was a Fulbright-Casten Family Scholar. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Columbia University, and CUNY Baruch College, as well as for the Philadelphia literary community Blue Stoop.
Andrea Caswell’s writing has been published widely in print and online. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Tampa Review, River Teeth, The Normal School, Columbia Journal, Atticus Review, and others. She holds a master’s from Harvard University and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She’s a fiction editor for Cleaver Magazine, and is the founder of Lime Street Writers, a monthly workshop north of Boston. In 2019 her fiction was accepted to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A native of Los Angeles, Andrea now lives and teaches in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Contact her at 
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Marnie Goodfriend is a writer, sexual assault advocate, and social practice artist. She is a 2018 VCCA fellow, recipient of the Jane G. Camp scholarship, and a 2016 PEN America fellow. Her advocacy work, 
Sydney Tammarine’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, B O D Y, Pithead Chapel, The New School’s LIT, and other journals. Her essay “Blue Hour” was selected as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2021. She is the co-translator of a book of poems, The Most Beautiful Cemetery in Chile. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University and teaches writing at Virginia Military Institute. She has led workshops at The Ohio State University, Hollins University, Otterbein University, and at high schools, including as Writer-in-Residence at Appomattox Regional Governor’s School. She serves as flash and creative nonfiction editor for Cleaver.
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Emily Steinberg, MFA, is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on painting and comics and serves as Cleaver’s Visual Narrative Editor. Her work has most recently been published by The New Yorker Magazine and is included in 
Michelle Renee Hoppe’s special education teaching outcomes helped to win court cases against the NYCDOE. She holds a partial MSED in special education and is a candidate for an MA in TESOL from MIIS. As founder and creative director of 
Karen Rile is the author of Winter Music (Little, Brown), a novel set in Philadelphia, and numerous works of fiction and creative nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in literary journals such as The Southern Review, American Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Other Voices, Superstition Review, Tishman Review, and has been shortlisted among The Best American Short Stories. Karen has published articles and essays in The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and others. She is the founding and chief editor of Cleaver and the Director of Cleaver Workshops.
Claire Oleson is the winner of the 2019 Newfound Chapbook Prize and a graduate of Kenyon College, where she studied English and Creative Writing. She has participated in graduate writing workshops with the Kenyon Review, where she also worked for the entirety of her undergraduate career. She has worked as a TA for Northwestern University’s summer creative writing courses. Her work has been published by the Kenyon Review online, the University of Kentucky’s graduate literary journal Limestone, the LA Review of Books, and Sugar House Review, among others. She currently serves as the poetry editor for Cleaver and lives and works in NYC.
Dinah Lenney has played countless roles on stage and television, from Lady Macbeth to ER’s Nurse Shirley. She’s a graduate of Yale, where she didn’t study theater, the Neighborhood Playhouse, where she did, and the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she presently teaches nonfiction. Dinah’s taught writing and acting in schools all over the country, and co-wrote Acting for Young Actors with director Mary Lou Belli. The author of The Object Parade and Bigger than Life, she also co-edited Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction with the late Judith Kitchen. Her latest book, Coffee, was published in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. Dinah lives (reads, writes, grinds, brews—in a Chemex, by the way) with her husband in Los Angeles.
Drew Pham is a queer, transgender writer of Vietnamese heritage. A child of war refugees, her work centers on legacies of violence in times of conflict. She has published in Blunderbuss Magazine, McSweeny’s, Slice Magazine, Foreign Policy, Time Magazine, The Daily Beast, and Columbia Journal, among others. She lives with her two cats in Brooklyn, NY, and she serves as an adjunct English lecturer at CUNY Brooklyn College.
Claire Rudy Foster is an award-winning queer, nonbinary trans author from Portland, Oregon. Foster’s critically acclaimed short story collection Shine of the Ever was an O: The Oprah Magazine pick for 2019. Their essays, fiction, reporting, book reviews, and other writing appear in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Allure, on NPR, and many other places. Foster is Senior Features Editor at The Rumpus. They still believe in the power of well-written sentences.
shea wesley martin is a fat, Black, queer, non-binary writer based in the mountains of Vermont. they write about the joy, pain, and triumph of being Black, queer, and not-quite-woman in and beyond this world. a freelance educator, they also research, consult, and write about creating and sustaining liberatory learning spaces.
Cleaver Poetry Reviews Editor 
Sydney Tammarine
AFTERBURN
