Class Description
How can poetry serve as a medium for memorializing important moments in time? This class will explore the ways we can bear witness to moments in our personal history, world history, and current events. We will read examples from Nazim Hikmet, Carolyn Forché, Yusef Komunyakaa, Saadi Youssef, and Primo Levi and through a fishbowl discussion, examine how they merge both truth and imagination in a poem and the different poetic modes that can be used to bear witness: elegies, epistles, litanies, and portraits.
We will try various exercises to spark our writing; be prepared to dive into the dictionary for random words to incorporate into a poem, imagine narratives from photographs, and cut up your own poems to discover fresh language. By the end of this class, students will have a draft of a new poem and exercises for both generating and revising future poems. Writing notebooks will be available, but feel free to bring your own. For writers age 13-18 ONLY.
Join GrubStreet’s Young Adult Writers Program (YAWP), a FREE creative writing workshop for Boston-area high schoolers. Our students come from a wide variety of high schools in the Boston area and enjoy cool writing exercises, mingling with fellow young writers, snacks, and an optional open mic. After four great years, YAWP has already been recognized by the Boston Globe as Boston's hub for writing teenagers. You must be 13-18 years to register.
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If you are registering on behalf of your teen, add their email information in the “For a Friend or Child?” field on the right-hand side of the screen before you check out. This will send them a direct link and reminder to create their own profile with GrubStreet.
(After adding the class to your cart, click "Checkout" and click “Add” next to “For a Friend or Child?” on the right-hand side to fill in their email. This is an easy way of linking the class to your child and encourages them to create their own account.)
Thanks to the excellent literary citizenship of our donors, scholarships are available for all GrubStreet classes. To apply, click the gray "APPLY FOR SCHOLARSHIP" button. In order to be considered for a scholarship, you must complete your application at least one week before the start date of a class. Please await our scholarship committee's decision before registering for the class. We cannot hold spots in classes, so the sooner you apply, the better. Scholarships cannot be applied retroactively.
For more detailed information about GrubStreet scholarships, including how to contribute to scholarship funds for other students, click here.
This class will take place using Zoom videoconferencing. Please visit the Resources tab to access the video-conference link.
Zoom Participation:
Students are not required to turn their camera on, but are encouraged to participate any way they feel comfortable through functions such as the live chat, emoji reactions, and unmuting the microphone. Learn more about using Zoom here.
Zoom Accessibility:
We ask that instructors enable closed captioning and send a transcript of the session after class. You can also enable closed captioning at any time during the meeting. If your instructor forgets to send the transcript, just send ’em an email!