Writing Soundly: Fine-Tuning the Acoustics of your Poetry. Jane Huffman, Instructor
May 3, 2025 - May 31, 2025
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Full course description
Registration opens on Wednesday, January 22, 2025.
IOWA SUMMER WRITING FESTIVAL
Spring 2025
Writing Soundly: Fine-Tuning the Acoustics of your Poetry (Five-Week Workshop)
Jane Huffman, Instructor
Saturdays, May 3–31, 2025
11:00 am – 2:00 pm Iowa/Central Time
12:00 pm – 3:00 pm Eastern Time
9:00 am - 12:00 pm Pacific Time
10:00 am – 1:00 pm Mountain Time
Fee: $650
Course Description
Poet Ishion Hutchinson writes, “I can hear the poem before it arrives.” In this class, this concept will become the focus of our exploration. Students will deep dive into the sonic, musical, and other sound-based aspects of poetry writing. Each week, we will explore a set of acoustic tools—assonance, consonance, syllabics, and meter––as these appear in both received forms and free verse poems, and work to expand our toolkit to include rhyme, chiasmus, repetition, and other rhythmic and musical possibilities on (and off) the page. All of these terms will be thoroughly defined in class as we go.
Half of each session will take a seminar format; students will engage with reading materials from living, modern, and pre-modern poets and thinkers and participate in lively class discussions. The second half of each session will be a workshop. Students will be invited to share new work that responds to lessons learned, giving and receiving feedback via Liz Lerman’s “Critical Response Process,” a highly approachable, artist-focused workshop method that the instructor will introduce in the first class session. The instructor will also provide an array of custom, optional writing prompts each week, based on our source texts and emergent curiosities, to guide students’ writing practices.
This course is open to writers of all experience levels; no prior experience with poetry writing is necessary. This workshop also includes a 30-minute one-on-one conference with the instructor.
Instructor
Jane Huffman is the author of Public Abstract, winner of the 2023 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. She is a doctoral candidate in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, Poetry, The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She was a 2019 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. This is her third season teaching for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.
The fee for this course is $650. 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!