PSNY Virtual Workshop: Multi-Directionality

An all-levels generative virtual workshop with poet Nkosi Nkululeko!

The square poem is a unique form with a rich and fascinating history. Its constraint: to write and read a text horizontally and vertically. In a form that appear specific, or even worse, niche, this workshop is devoted to exploring the hidden network between the square poem and other "complicated" forms such as palindromes, contrapuntals, and even the standard lyric poem. How can we absorb technique and then look beyond it? How can we learn to use forms as a way to disturb our comfortable methods of reading and discover the multiple paths in a poem we forgot to imagine? We will read poets like Mark McMorris, Khadijah Queen, Lewis Carroll, Golden, Marwa Helal, and Tyehimba Jess to aid us in answering these questions.

About the Instructor: Nkosi Nkululeko’s work is published in Chess Life Online, Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, Poem-A-Day, Poet Lore, The Offing, Oxford Poetry, and his square poems are published in ANMLY, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Nation, and featured in The World Chess Hall of Fame’s 2025-2026 exhibition Reading Between the Lines: Chess & Literature. He is the winner of Michigan Quarterly Review’s Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets, and the recipient of fellowships from Poets House, Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Callaloo, and the Watering Hole. He is anthologized in Bettering American Vol. 3 and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry. Nkosi is a chess, music, and poetry teacher from Harlem!

**This workshop will take place on Zoom.**