Event

Camp Lawless

Instructor: Amy Lawless

This poetry summer camp/workshop takes place at Bowery Poetry Club on the following Sundays from 12PM-2PM

June 4, June 11, June 18, June 25, July 2, July 16, July 23, July 30, August 6, August 13, August 20

At Camp Lawless, your primary goal is to develop new poems: a quantity of your own original writing. And like any Summer Camp, you will emerge as a somewhat unrecognizable but more experienced form of yourself. Our generative format will allow you to develop your voices, write voluminously, journal (yes, you may write home!), and scare yourself. This class will be playful, harness the fun of summer sun and Sundays, but it will also be hard work! We will study non-traditional forms, collaboration, ekphrastic writing, elegy, using the self, hybrid, anti-poems, found, nature, formal, conceptual, dreams, the internet, and more. Class time will be spent on active writing, workshops, experiencing, listening to and responding to visitors, a little editing, and you will also practice performing your new work! We will be visited by two amazing working poets (TBA), read poetry, words, and letters from the past and present. And since its SUMMER, we will take a writing excursion to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as to the sidewalks, parks, and even the New York City Poetry Festival for inspiration and writing.

We will feel the summer heat, eat pizza, eat ice cream and write hungrily, constantly, responsibly, and recklessly. The summer will end with a capstone project: a chapbook manuscript! If youre doing it right, youll cry tears of joy and tears of wild emotion: either way changed and renewed!

Every week we will read cutting-edge, crazy, and curious poetry, words, and letters from the past, present, and the future like John Keats, Vincent Van Gogh, Gaston Bachelard, John Wieners, Mary Ruefle, Sommer Browning, Chris Kraus, Anne Boyer, and more.