What Light Comes Through the Delicate Form

This workshop will be dedicated to both experimentation (creating the new) and renewal (visiting the previous). Our time together will focus primarily on FORM. We’ll begin with generating new material then, step-by-step, consciously and delicately apply and remove layers of punctuation, capitalization, caesura, line breaks, and even font choices. We’ll try things out, talk it through, and consider how certain subtle or “little” moves can powerfully shift our poems, allowing the light to break through.

We will also dedicate a significant portion of each class to discussing previously written pieces. Our discussions will be conducted in the spirit of what would happen if…? We will read each other’s poems, brainstorm together, and practice generosity by offering as many ideas and options for our peers to artfully renew their poems. Students will be asked to share portfolios of three to four poems beforehand.

Layli Long Soldier is author of the collection Whereas (Graywolf Press, 2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle award, the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her poems and critical work have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, and BOMB, among many others. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She was awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2018. In 2021, she received an Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK. Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and serves as the 2024-25 Endowed Chair at Texas State University. She resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.