Spring Virtual Poetry Intensive: Can a Poem be a Conversation?

When: April 1 – May 6, 2026 (Wednesdays, 6:30–8:30 PM EST)

Duration: 6 Weeks

Format: Virtual, via Zoom

Workshop Overview:

Frank O’Hara once wrote, “if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem". Can writing a poem really be that easy? How might we convert low-stakes speech acts into poems which offer surprise and revelation? What formal choices might affect how the audience encounters our poems?

Over the course of this six-week generative writing workshop, we’ll examine the speech acts we associate with love, friendship, and labor and how they might manifest for (and from) different sources. Engaging with work by emerging and established poets, we’ll consider poetic forms and devices from the cento to the caesura that will expand our writing practice.

About the Instructor:

Asa Drake is a Filipina/white poet and teaching artist in Central Florida. She is the author of Maybe the Body (Tin House, 2026) and Beauty Talk (Noemi Press 2026), winner of the 2024 Noemi Press Book Award. Her chapbook One Way to Listen was selected by Taneum Bambrick as the winner of Gold Line Press’s 2021 Poetry Chapbook Competition. A National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, the Florida Book Awards, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Storyknife, Sundress Publications, Tin House, Idyllwild Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poems can be found on The Slowdown Podcast, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily and Poetry Daily. She received her MFA in poetry from The New School and her MIS from Florida State University. In addition to teaching craft intensives with Tin House, Hugo House, Sundress Publications and The Loft Literary Center, she has organized and participated in community and conference panels with the Florida Library Association, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and Kundiman South. She currently serves as an associate editor with the Beloit Poetry Journal.