Darcie Dennigan

BA, University of Massachusetts. MFA, University of Michigan. Author of four books of poetry—the forthcoming Commander! as well as Madame X, Palace of Subatomic Bliss, and Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse, which won Fordham's Poets Out Loud prize. Her manuscript Forever Valley was a finalist for the New Direction/Fitzcarraldo Novel Prize in 2023, and her plays have received the George and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation fellowship and the Poetry Society of America's Anna Rabinowitz award. She has taught at the University of Connecticut, Rhode Island School of Design, and elsewhere. She directs the Spatulate Church Emergency Shift, an ad hoc poets theatre group. SLC, 2023–

Graduate Courses 2025-2026

Master of Fine Arts in Writing

Poetry Workshop: Procedures, Constraints, Psychic Automatism, and the Aleatory Abyss

Seminar—Spring

WRIT 7017

This workshop is inspired somewhat by the great field of pataphysics (the science of imaginary solutions) and somewhat by the collective terror of the blank page. We will spend some time exploring different modes of beginning and growing a poem, modes that are loosely based in, and then range beyond, the French surrealists and the Oulipians. We will play games of chance, invoke dream states, and practice listening for (your own) "inexhaustible murmur"—and we will also play with numbers, examine relationships between contexts and constraints, and make rules (impossible, labyrinthian rules!) born out of the tendencies of your current work. While neither absolute freedom nor imprisoning form may ultimately work for you, my hope is that you will see where on the spectrum your own writing processes feel most alive and where and how these modes may help you re-enter and revise your poems. The poets who will help us include Cody-Rose Clevidence, M. Nourbese Philip, Anne Garreta, Sawako Nakayasu, Farnoosh Fathi, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Mónica de la Torre, and Mathias Svalina. Alfred Jarry will be our lodestar.

Faculty