Faculty
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 2026-2027
Master of Fine Arts in Writing
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Seminar—Spring
WRIT 7017
Be epic, take up space, forget that poetry is an art of endings. In this workshop, you will experiment with insistence, extremity, suspension, suppleness, dispersion, brittleness, time constraints, recursion, fractals, stanzaic forms, collage, and yes, narrative, all toward the writing of a poem that takes up the space of an entire book. You will investigate the impulse to end the poem at the page’s end, and practice seeing how the writing of the poem can meld with your daily rituals to become part of the ritual itself. Our readings will include some book-length works, likely Proof of Stake: An Elegy by Charles Valle; Ossuaries by Dionne Brand; My Life by Lyn Hejinian; The Plentitude We Cry For by Sarah Appleton; Poemland by Chelsey Minnis; Deepstep Come Shining by C.D. Wright; I Love a Broad Margin to My Life by Maxine Hong Kingston; Crawl by Héctor Viel Temperley; Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer; Pink Waves by Sawako Nakayasu; and The Book of the Green Man by Ronald Johnson.
Faculty
Previous Courses
Master of Fine Arts in Writing
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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