“Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?”
Writing Intensity in the Short Poem
with Jennifer Franklin
What is the age-old attraction of the short poem for poets and readers alike and how can we learn, through our in-depth examination of brief poems, how to create a small poem that packs a huge punch. In this class, we will examine the way short poems can serve any purpose—they can be about nature, politics, or love. They can be imagistic, didactic, or philosophical. Simple or abstract, they can focus on an image or engage the senses. They can be grounded in reality or ignite the reader’s imagination. They can be language driven or meaning driven. The short poem is deceptive. They are not easy to write because every word needs to be right because each word has more weight. They are often beguiling, magical, fierce, and powerful. They can tell a secret. They linger and embed themselves into one’s consciousness. They can be easily memorized and often become friends to call upon in times of joy or in times of grief. We will examine poems by Dickinson, Tu Fu, Celan, Dove, Brown, Alexander, Gregg, Gilbert, Chang, Valentine, Ostriker, Howe, Chen, Merwin, Hughes, Hayden, Cavafy, Szymborska, Simic, Kaminsky, Rilke, Larkin, Daye, Laird, Cisneros, Milosz, and others. We will write our own short poems each day through a series of prompts and we will share and revise this work throughout the class.
A small group workshop | 4 Afternoons | 3 hours per day
Jennifer Franklin is the author of four poetry collections, including A Fire in Her Brain, selected by Rowan Ricardo Phillips for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets (Princeton University Press, 2026). Poems from the collection (epistolary poems to Virginia Woolf, Lucia Joyce, and Sylvia Plath) have been published in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, The 2025 Pushcart Anthology, and the Montreal International Poetry Prize Anthology.
Her work has been commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, published in The Bedford Guide to Literature (Macmillan, 2024), The Paris Review, The Nation, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, and Poetry Society of America’s Poetry in Motion.
Her previous book, If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, March 2023), was a finalist for the Paterson Prize in Poetry and a finalist for the Julie Suk Award.
She is the recipient of a 2025 Pushcart Prize, and residencies from The Hawthornden Foundation and the T.S. Eliot Foundation for 2026. She was awarded the 2024 Jon Tribble Editing Fellowship from Poetry by the Sea, a 2021 NYFA/City Artist Corps grant for poetry, and a 2021 Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Award.
Jennifer’s passion is teaching and she has a devoted following of talented students in her manuscript revision workshops.