Tennis Nets & Rule-Breakers: The Golden Shovel (Drake Hall)
OSHR 4124“Because where do poems come from if not other poems? Where do forms come from if not other forms?” —Terrance Hayes, foreword to the Golden Shovel. “I'd sooner write free verse as play tennis with the net down.” —Robert Frost. Writing in form can shake up our writing tendencies and habits. Following a form can allow for surprising syntax, unexpected word choice, and new conversations with other poems and poets. In this class, we will learn about the Golden Shovel form, invented and popularized by Terrance Hayes in honor of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, “We Real Cool.” We will read, write, and share poems that follow and are inspired by the Golden Shovel form. New writers are welcome.
Chloé Leisure is a poet and a community creative writing teacher. Born and raised in Marquette, Michigan, she lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with her family. She has been teaching writing and poetry for over 20 years in college classrooms, elementary schools, and libraries. She’s taught poetry on a riverbank, fourth-graders in a freak blizzard on the Western Slope, and graduate students in the grass. She has been teaching at OLLI for 10 years. She earned her MA in Creative Writing at Northern Arizona University and her MFA in Poetry at Colorado State University. Leisure was the 2014 Fort Collins Poet Laureate and is the author of the chapbook, The End of the World Again (Finishing Line Press). Her poetry has appeared in publications including The Blue Mountain Review, Colorado Review, Matter, The Night Heron Barks, [PANK], Second Coming, and Ross Gay & Shayla Lawson’s The Tenderness Project.
Notes
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