PSNY Virtual Workshop: How to End a Poem
Part of The Poetry Society of New York's Weekly Virtual Workshop Series.
With poet Mary Helen Callier!
Poetry is full of familiar adages: we are often told to end with an image, to show rather than tell. How can we take these adages and generatively invert them? In this workshop we are going to examine poems that combine the lyric power of image with the rhetorical force of pronouncement. We will look at poems by Sandra Lim, Carl Phillips, and Sara Nicholson to explore what generative associations, ambiguities, and resonances can occur in the gap between an image and its explanation, and we will consider how to pattern these moments in our own work. We will work together to generate two lists: one of statements, declarations, and pronouncements, and one of images. We will consider how these lists inflect and inform each other, and how we might work with them to build a poem.
About the Instructor: Mary Helen Callier is the author of When the Horses (Alice James Books, 2025). Her poems have appeared in Bennington Review, Sixth Finch, New England Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and is currently an instructor and doctoral candidate in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver, where she serves as one of the poetry editors for Denver Quarterly.
* *This workshop will take place on Zoom.**
Part of The Poetry Society of New York's Weekly Virtual Workshop Series.
With poet Mary Helen Callier!
Poetry is full of familiar adages: we are often told to end with an image, to show rather than tell. How can we take these adages and generatively invert them? In this workshop we are going to examine poems that combine the lyric power of image with the rhetorical force of pronouncement. We will look at poems by Sandra Lim, Carl Phillips, and Sara Nicholson to explore what generative associations, ambiguities, and resonances can occur in the gap between an image and its explanation, and we will consider how to pattern these moments in our own work. We will work together to generate two lists: one of statements, declarations, and pronouncements, and one of images. We will consider how these lists inflect and inform each other, and how we might work with them to build a poem.
About the Instructor: Mary Helen Callier is the author of When the Horses (Alice James Books, 2025). Her poems have appeared in Bennington Review, Sixth Finch, New England Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and is currently an instructor and doctoral candidate in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver, where she serves as one of the poetry editors for Denver Quarterly.
* *This workshop will take place on Zoom.**