The Perfect Sonnet — with Denise Duhamel
$75 — Saturday, October 12 @ 12 PM EST
2 Hours via Zoom
Overview of the Workshop
This is a generative workshop focusing on the sonnet’s traditional form and its ever-evolving, exciting, flexible variations. We will revel in this mighty small powerhouse of a poem and its possibilities. Please come ready to write, experiment, distill, expand, and laugh a little too. Maybe you have wondered—as I have—how sonnet-like must a poem be to be a sonnet? We’ll try to answer that as we look to Shakespeare and beyond—prose sonnets (Harryette Mullen), the "American sonnet" (Wanda Colman and Terrance Hayes) the Seussian memoir sonnet (Diane Suess), and abacedarian sonnets (Barbara Hamby). Students will engage with the rigor and flexibility of the form, learning all the sonnet can hold.
Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In Which (2024) is a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize. She and the late Maureen Seaton co-authored five collections, the most recent of which was CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). Her nonfiction publications include The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (with Julie Marie Wade, Noctuary Press, 2019). A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.