Triggers

I just received word from The Loft that my newly-proposed  class on poetic inspiration has been approved for the Winter/Spring session of online classes.  I don’t have an exact start date yet, but it will be in January or February.  I’ll post the link when registration becomes available.  Here’s the description from the proposal:

Class Title:  Triggering Poetic Inspiration

Course description:

Where do poem ideas come from?  Finding a way to sustain poetry writing beyond those first emotion-driven poems that we just have to write is often the challenge facing poets who have been writing for awhile. In this course we will be reading and discussing Richard Hugo’s excellent book on poetic inspiration and poetry writing, The Triggering Town.  Each week we will read one of the book’s eight short chapters and discuss what we find there, in addition to writing a new poem from a prompt and posting it for discussion and feedback.  Poets will come out of this class with eight new poems, as well as some new tools for generating inspiration and ideas.

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Meanwhile, I’m taking an online class through the Fine Arts Work Center—Getting Poems Started, Keeping Them Going, with Mark Wunderlich.  The description:
Mark Wunderlich’s course will provide you with practical tools for starting poems, building on them, revising them and pushing them to their best possible conclusions. Using letters, directions, prayers, lists, litanies, etc. as a starting point, you will be guided through the entire development process for creating your own personal poems.

I’m excited about taking a class and getting some writing done, and the description sounds like it fits right in with the poems I need to write–incantations for my MSAB grant project.  Fingers crossed, pen at the ready!