Arlington Community Education

“If making a bank shot in pool was easy, we’d all be pool sharks. In poetry, one of the best ways to practice technique is to write in traditional forms,” writes poet Rebecca Hazelton. Explore a variety of poetic forms as “containers” for your poems, whether you’re new to writing poetry or have been writing for a while. We’ll look at examples of forms ranging from the traditional (sonnet, sestina, haiku) to the contemporary (Terrance Hayes’s golden shovel, Jericho Brown’s duplex) to forms we invent ourselves; do in-class writing exercises; engage in supportive group discussion; and offer feedback on each other’s work, which does not have to be written in form.