Poetry

I love working with poets who are open to experimenting and developing their talent. I take a tactile and collaborative approach, with a lot of back and forth. My goal is to help poets identify, understand, and hone skills, while learning to recognize and use form, rhythm, and syntax with confidence and intention. I’m fond of working surprise into serious poems, and irony into lyrics. My expertise is prosody and precision writing, and ensuring that form supports ideas. I can teach you how to write formal verse—and how to move away from meter by modulating the pacing and by using idiomatic language. 

One of the most important skills that a poet can possess is a deep understanding of how sentences and lines overlap. It connects to timing and duration, rhythm and pacing, and the idea that is unfolding. It helps you work irony in and pull the reader’s attention to a single transitive verb or a strongly enjambed line-ending in order to make your point not only by telling a story but by telling a story with technique. 

Part of the thrill of teaching poetry is working with technique. In poetry, just as in music, sound, speed, and noise add color to phrasing or make a line or a syllable more emphatic. In a well-made poem, there are no accidental line endings or meaningless words. If you are interested in taking leaps of faith inside your poem, syntactical or conceptual, I will always believe in what you are doing. Meanwhile, I will help you figure out how to be the best poet you are capable of becoming. I know this is possible because this is what I am also doing. 

Fee: $175 per hour to edit individual poems, flat fee of $700 to curating a chapbook.