Submerged in the Sublime: The Expression of Self-Hood through the Modern Sonnet

The modern sonnet, a short, sweet, 14-ish lines of poetry, can be the perfect container for expression. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss writes, "The sonnet is an endlessly fluid, reimagined form. It has been hushed, lushed, fragmented, fogged, elated, flipped and freaked by everyone." While the traditional sonnet most of us learned in school is a rigid puzzle with many rules, the modern sonnet can be a brief adventure, an exploration with only a few rules--all which are made to be broken. In this generative workshop, we will dive into the beauty and intensity of the modern sonnet--looking at examples by Diane Seuss, Edna St Vincent Millay, Gerald Stern, and Lucille Clifton, to discover the ways breaking the bounds of the sonnet form can set us free.

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MEGHAN STERLING'S work has been published or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Rhino Poetry, Nelle, Colorado Review, Rattle, and many others, and has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. Her debut poetry collection, These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books), came out in 2021 and was a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize in Poetry. Her chapbook, Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions) her collection, Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) and her collection, View from a Borrowed Field, which won Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize, are forthcoming in 2023. She is program director at Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. Read her work at meghansterling.com.

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After you register, you will receive an "admission ticket" with the zoom link information on it.

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Annual Membership $35