Poetry and the Art of the Page: Breaking It Apart and Putting It Back Together. Laura Jaramillo, Instructor

Registration opens on Wednesday, January 22, 2025.

 

IOWA SUMMER WRITING FESTIVAL

 

Spring 2025

 

Poetry and the Art of the Page: Breaking It Apart and Putting It Back Together (Four-Week Workshop)

 

Laura Jaramillo, Instructor

 

Dates/Time

Saturdays on Zoom, April 5–26, 2025

• 12:00 pm–3:00 pm Iowa/Central Time
• 1:00 pm–4:00 pm Eastern Time
• 10:00 am–1:00 pm Pacific Time
• 11:00 am–2:00 pm Mountain Time

 

 

Fee: $550

 

 

Course Description

 

We tend to think of the visual aspects of poems like line breaks, fonts, stanza length, white space, and layout as incidental to the poems’ content. We sometimes treat the page as just a container for the feelings or stories the poem is trying to transmit. This class flips that assumption on its head, wagering that by approaching the page like graphic designers or even advertisers, poets can grab readers’ attention more effectively and, in the process, become better writers. We will also investigate how the graphic and visual aspects of poems that often go unnoticed determine so much about how we perceive poems in the moment of reading them.  

 

This course will be hands-on, so you should be open to breaking apart your own poems as well as playfully and respectfully experimenting with your peers’ poems. In the first two weeks of class, you will generate writing based on prompts provided by me, and we will use the workshop as a space to further experiment with and tweak your prompt-generated writing. In the second half of the class, we will apply the principles learned in the first two weeks to poems you have drafted on your own to see how the visual concepts learned in our class unsettle your existing methods of writing and constructing poems.

 

To guide our explorations, we will look at a range of poems that activate the page space in notable ways, from the radical graphic experimentation of Guillaume Apollinaire calligrammes to the line breaks of Eileen Myles poems to the all-caps aesthetics of Juliana Huxtable hybrid prose poems. 

 

Each week, you will receive verbal and written feedback from myself and your peers on your writing. Towards the end of the course, we will have a 30-minute one-on-one conference where we will discuss your overall progress, questions, and future directions for your work. 

 

This workshop is for anyone who wants to make their poems not just funny or smart or deep but also visually impactful. I welcome newer poets as well as poets with advanced practices wanting to expand the graphic aspects of their poetry. This course is also suitable for fiction or hybrid prose writers who are interested in exploring the visual in their writing. 

 

Takeaways:  

• Exposure to new techniques and principles for composing poetry.  

• A more sophisticated understanding of editing beyond just simple rewriting. 

• The ability to take the page apart and put it back together in a way that serves the content of the poem in the most visually impactful way possible. 

• A sense of poetry as an experimental and experiential process. 

  

 

Instructor

 

Laura Jaramillo is a poet and critic. Born to Colombian parents in Queens, New York, she now lives in Durham, North Carolina. Her books include Material Girl (subpress, 2012) and Making Water (Futurepoem, 2022). She holds a PhD in critical theory from Duke University. She co-runs the North Carolina-based reading and performance series Paradiso.  

 

 

Registration & Fees

 

The fee for this course is $550. Payment in full is required to register.

Registrations are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

Class size is limited to 12.

 

Note: Your credit card payment will be processed by an external provider and will appear on your credit card statement as “UI Writing—Magid Center.”

 

Refund & Cancellation Policy

 

If you need to cancel your enrollment, please let us know as soon as possible. We can only offer full refunds if you cancel one week prior to the start of class. After that, before the start-date of class, we can offer a 50% refund. We cannot refund day-of cancellations, and we cannot refund or partially refund registration fees once the class has begun.

 

Terms & Community Policy

 

1.  The Iowa Summer Writing Festival is a program for adults. You must be at least 18 years old to enroll in Festival workshops.

 

2.  The Iowa Summer Writing Festival is a community built on an assumption of shared enterprise, in the spirit of mutual respect. We reserve the right to a) revoke the registration of or b) dismiss from the program any person who disrupts the learning/working environment of others. Participants in the Festival are subject to all University of Iowa policies governing conduct in our community, whether online or in person.

 

Questions?

 

Contact the Iowa Summer Writing Festival: iswfestival@uiowa.edu. Phone: (319) 335-4160.

 

Our small staff is out and about. If you phone and we miss you, please leave a detailed message!