MA, University of California-Davis. PhD, New York University. Heise is the author of Moth; or how I came to be with you again (Sarabande) and Horror Vacui: Poems (Sarabande), as well as The Gentrification Plot: New York and the Postindustrial Crime Novel (Columbia) and Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture (Rutgers). His poetry, short stories, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Chicago Review, Santa Monica Review, The Missouri Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Wigleaf, American Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, and elsewhere. Heise has held residencies at MacDowell, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Millay Arts, and American Academy in Rome. A former professor at McGill University, he is currently a professor of creative writing and American literature at Pennsylvania State University (Abington), as well as a guest faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College. SLC, 2025–
Writing
Open, Seminar—Spring
WRIT 3510
Craft and experimentation, order and disorder, the “well-wrought urn” and Duchamp’s Fountain, the centripetal forces of technique and the petals scattered by the winds of the imagination. In this workshop, we will spend a semester exploring what we might call the polarity between poetic form that produces the well-made poem and the uncontainable impulses of the imagination that disrupts, defamiliarizes, and destroys our best-laid plans. We may find that these polarities are ultimately false: As the poet Dean Young once wrote, there is an “art of recklessness.” Our discussions and readings about “craft” will build up or reinforce your familiarity with many of the fundamental elements of poetry, such as imagery, line lengths, line breaks, voice, form, and sound. Understanding, practicing, and honing your skills with these craft elements will improve your own writing, as well as help you talk about each other’s poems with greater precision and insight during our workshops. In turn, our discussions and readings about “experimentation” will call into question ideas about originality, well-wrought language, and expressiveness as they apply to poetry. We will do so by “writing” in a variety of experimental ways. These will include “found” poems, poems written through erasures or deletions, poems pushed through multiple translation engines until they become “new,” and poems written using arbitrary procedures. Throughout the term, we will analyze modern and contemporary poetry, manifestos, and essays on poetics. You will meet with me in an individual conference every other week, and we will meet as a class once a week for discussion and workshop. By the end of the semester, you will submit a portfolio of your revised poems, along with a reflection on your own poetics and your writing and revision process.
