664 Getting the Knack: Poetry-Oriented Exercises for ANY Writer
Class | Registration opens 8/4/2025 12:00 AM
William Stafford notes that every child is a born poet, and the mystery is why so many grownup people stop. Some of us keep writing, but don’t like to call ourselves “poets.” Perhaps you are one of them!
Using exercises for both poets and prose writers, this class will focus on how to prime the pump to get started and keep going, including ideas and prompts from Stafford and other writers, using resources like The Artist’s Way, The Observation Deck, and more, including exercises from Getting the Knack, a title I’m using as the title for this class.
Though the exercises can work for both poets and prose-writers to inject more imagery and sonal interest into sentences and prose poems, we’ll work primarily on short forms characteristic of poems: imagery, line breaks, sound. The exercises are helpful in all kinds of genres, but we will limit the form to blank verse. No forcing sound and sense into whalebone corsets; rhyme is welcome but not enforced!
- Other expectations: Computer literacy/access and email.
- Required materials: Bring your pen/pencil, paper – and imagination!
S.E. (Sharlene) Gilman
S. E. GILMAN’s poetry has recently appeared in the anthology from PSU Press, Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, edited by Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple. Her short fiction appeared in Common Bonds: Stories by and About Modern Texas Women, Permafrost, Hawaiian Review, Stone Drum, Oxford Magazine, Modern Words, and others. Her recent poetry has appeared in Meat for Tea, Word Fountain, and other small press magazines since the 1970s. She writes occasionally in the Daily Item weekend column “Forward Thinking”. She has taught writing and literacy tutoring in a variety of contexts – in universities, community settings, at a correctional institution and on reservations. Native to Galveston, Texas she has lived in Austin (Texas), Concord (N.H.), Davis (Calif.), and is now semi-"re-wired" in central Pennsylvania.