Poetry Seminar

Join us online August 2 – 6, 2026

As always, you’ll have access to instruction from our world-class faculty, focused attention on your work, and the vital exchanges of peers in workshop. Our goal is to support, refresh, and inspire you.

Spend four days with a select community of poets exploring your artistic work in the context of a rich variety of poetry ancestors and contemporaries.
Discover how poetic community can provide models, provocations and correctives to widen your thinking about your own efforts.
Learn from a distinguished and accomplished faculty how poets choose, imitate, enter into dialogue with, and sometimes argue with the work of our poetic ancestors and contemporaries.

The Seminar schedule features a daily presentation/discussion exploring aspects of craft and technique, an afternoon workshop of participants’ poems or individual, virtual meetings with faculty, and an evening reading, some by faculty poets and others featuring participants.

Formalist Track: Freedom and Form

Form is enjoying a robust comeback, with poets writing now not just in received forms like sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, ghazals, haiku, tanka (as well as free verse, itself a form), but also in a broad array of exciting new forms including golden shovels, bops, duplexes, syncopated sonnets, and more.

At the Poetry Seminar, we’re interested in form as a way to connect contemporary poets with the most ancient tools of our art, and especially with form’s flexibility to be adapted in ways that only the future can imagine. Learn more about the Formalist Track.