This workshop is canceled. Would you be interested in participating in a similar workshop in the future? Let us know at events@nysoclib.org.

How do poets employ, adapt, and respond to their urban environments while exploring their personal interests and obsessions? In this practical workshop, we will compose and revise poems informed by urban backdrops and experiences while addressing subjects that individually engage us. To illuminate our paths and instruct our work, we will consider how the metropolis appears in different ways - as theme, as setting, as metaphor - in poems by W. H. Auden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Langston Hughes, Philip Levine, Federico Garcia Lorca, Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and others. In addition to discussing participants’ poems, we will identify directions for ongoing related work.

Bhisham Bherwani is the author of three poetry books. His essays have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the American Reader, Pleiades, Rain Taxi, the Yale Review, and other places. He was educated at Cornell University and New York University.

The Writing Life events in 2021 are generously underwritten by Jenny Lawrence.