How do you write about everything from joy in response to death to a first blowjob? Find out in January’s workshop!

How do we question and harness retribution and anger in our poems? How do we pull light and heat from rage? Mostly, how can we get away with being our best mean person on the page while honoring our own ethics, integrity, humor, and readers? In this workshop, be prepared to curse, apologize for sins you’re secretly glad you committed, and reveal edgy confessions.

Throughout this eight-week generative course, we’ll explore various poets (more on that below) who manage to get away with risky confessions, potentially volatile statements, and controversial revelations. What keeps us as distant readers engaged? When are we turned off? 

Is there a way we can ethically invoke shock, discomfort, AND compassion toward ourselves, our subjects, and our readers?

A good part of the class will then be devoted to creating our own virtuous “mean-person” on the page through a series of optional, guided writing prompts. You’ll also explore free-verse and lesser-known poetic forms and themes, including the golden shovel, cento, ottava rima, and abecedarians. 

Here’s a preview of the many facets of ethical bitchiness:

Complicity—nobody gets off the hook

See the fearless humanity in the other entity

Humor

Essential Information

Metaphor as a vehicle for transformation

More to be discussed in course…

Each week will focus on a central theme of our ethical bitchiness. For example, one week we may focus on sex, the next week, trauma, then family, race, etc. We’ll be discussing a multitude of poets, such as Laura-Anne Bosselaar, Wanda Coleman, Ocean Vuong, Kim Addonizio, and Tommye Blount.

Let’s take a look at several ways Meg Kearney shocks her reader in “First Blow Job”:

Suddenly I knew how it was to be my uncle’s Labrador retriever,

young pup paddling furiously back across the pond with the prize

duck in her mouth, doing the best she could to keep her nose in the air

Right off the bat we have humor: Kearney compares herself to a dog, and metaphor as a vehicle for transformation: it’s clear (especially as we continue reading) that the speaker is using the act of a swimming dog to mean something else in the speaker’s life. Ending the stanza with “doing the best she could to keep her nose in the air” is our first cue that this comparison is leading us somewhere deeper. 

so she could breathe. She was learning not to bite, to hold the duck

just firmly enough, to command its slick length without leaving marks.

She was about to discover that if she reached the shore, delivered this

We see complicity—nobody gets off the hook with lines like She was learning not to bite.

duck just the way she’d been trained, then Master would pet her

head and make those cooing sounds, maybe later he’d let her ride

in the cab of the truck. She would rest her chin on his thigh all the way

home, and if she’d been good enough, she might get to wear

The rhinestone-studded collar, he might give her a cookie, he might

not shove her off the bed when he was tired and it was time to sleep.

In the last line, we see the fearless humanity in the other entity as the speaker humanizes the subject. We get the first humanizing description of the subject: “he was tired”. The speaker gives weight with the placement—the one offering from the inside perspective of the subject appears in the last line, leaving the reader to chew on that the longest. 

For more discussion points like this, sign up for the workshop, through Larksong Writers Place, to try your hand at excavating your own shocking self or ethical bitchiness on the page. We’ll interrogate other poets as well as each other’s work. See you there!