Part of The Poetry Society of New York's Weekly Virtual Workshop Series.

With poet Sarah Ghazal Ali!

Often in creative writing spaces, we are discouraged from being repetitive or hyper fixated on a subject. But when I think repetition, I think ritual. I think return. Forget tension—what pleasures might lie beneath the familiarity of a revisited subject or image? How might repeating ourselves actually help us discover something new?

In this workshop, we will explore the engine of obsession: we'll lean into repetition in new and unexpected ways. As a group, we'll read some examples of poetic obsession, and then go through an exercise mapping repetition in our work. The workshop will conclude with generative writing toward a new draft.

About the Instructor: Sarah Ghazal Ali is a poet, teacher, and editor. She is the author of Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024), selected as the Editors' Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award. A Stadler Fellow and recipient of The Sewanee Review poetry prize, her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, and other publications. She is the poetry editor for West Branch and an incoming Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College. 

* *This workshop will take place on Zoom.**