Intermediate poetry workshop · CREA
Just write. None of the other bullshit like presentations or quizzes or whatever. Write your poems and live your life and you'll do great.
All work was due after finals on Jan 3: one manuscript (15 pages of poems), one poem responses (one page reactions); one poetry reading review; one poetry book review.
Honestly, I wasn't crazy about her. I was expecting so much more out of a workshop, but I got very little out of it. So little time was spent on each person's work that I just cannot fathom how people even felt like they were improving. I didn't find her particularly interesting or charming and she often struggled to understand very obvious things in a poem. She wasn't a bad workshop leader, just very average.
TAKE THIS CLASS! If you care about poetry, you'll do great. 11/10.
My my what a fantastic woman Dottie is. Every day was an adventure and I mean that in the best way. The first day of class, she appears in an all-red jumpsuit with wonderful sparkly glasses and an N-95 mask under a red-studded sequin mask and we do an exercise on a Gertrude Stein quote about the color red. To say the least, the entire term followed up in the same beautiful way. She was very caring and conscientious of health, asking us all to wear masks if we could and for us to stay home if we felt any symptoms just to be safe. There was always a Zoom room available for people to call in and still be present for the workshopping. The class operated best when there was no structure: we'd read peoples' poems, give feedback, talk about poetry, laugh a lot, and repeat the cycle again until the two hours were up. She had other intentions for class presentations and mini-lectures for students to give on poems she put on the syllabus, but with all the workshopping, there was just never any time for anything else. She encouraged students to write about the grotesque and the unsaid, sparking creativity and vulnerability at every turn. She's simply a very open, enthusiastic woman and poetic genius. She always gave wonderful feedback in a gracious and kind way, never seeming like she new better simply because she was the professor and we were her students. I hope to take more classes wi…
Ten poems, one per week, seven of which are about prescribed themes (a poem about another species, a poem addressing someone or something, a poem that to the poet in the third person, a minimalist poem, etc.), written comments on the poems from each week that weren't covered in class, weekly readings.
This was definitely a worthwhile class. Professor Fragos did a great job of creating a productive atmosphere for discussion. She's serious enough that she won't let you get away with shitty poems, but light enough that you'll enjoy coming to class, although part of the "enjoy coming to class" part also depends in part on your classmates (my class had a good balance of criticism and positive feedback, but I've heard of other workshops in which that was not the case). Ms. Fragos also occasionally reads poems out loud for the class, which is just wonderful, because she's a great reader. She also knows many contemporary poets and frequently gives anecdotes about them, which is nice. The only complaint I have about Ms. Fragos is that she tends to focus much more on the language of the poem in the individual lines than on the thought-content of the poem as a whole. Perhaps that's how it should be in an undergraduate intermediate workshop. But it seemed overall that Ms. Fragos (and, accordingly, the class as a whole) was more interested in just making the language of the poem the best it could be, rather than ensuring that the language best expressed the poet's perspective on the idea, topic, event, etc., being discussed. But I guess whether or not that's a good or bad thing depends on some of your beliefs about poetry. Ms. Fragos gives excellent comments on every poem, although we o…
a poem a week, general topics and at least three "open mic" poems, what she calls the poems without a prompt, edits for the final portfolio: choose ten out of the eleven or twelve you write.
Emily Fragos is a wonderful person to have for workshop. She questions everything that needs to be--she usually asks what the class thinks about the end or a particular word or section before telling what she thinks. she doesn't lecture between poems but if a poem brings up what she thinks about the workings of poetry or writing, she'll sum it up quickly. she's funny, you'll like her. she's good for you and a really good poet herself.