Master Class with Douglas Kearney: "All Hooks: Repetition and Revision FTW"

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Master Class with Douglas Kearney: "All Hooks: Repetition and Revision FTW"

"So, I was listening to Beyoncé's "Formation," trying to figure out why it caught my ear the way it did; then I realized, the whole song is a series of hooks, choruses, layered throughout the mix. Repetition is groove, loop, hook, a serious tool in Black aesthetic trickbags. In this master class, we will engage elements of repetition: chime, pun, and recursive constraints to engage poems that move even when they seem to stand still, work refrain till it don't stop, and catch you reading twice when you think you're only reading once.”

Douglas Kearney is the author of seven poetry collections, including Sho (Wave Books, 2021), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and is a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry; and Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry. Kearney is the 2021 recipient of OPERA America’s Campbell Opera Librettist Prize: his operas include Sucktion, Mordake, Crescent City, Sweet Land (the Music Critics of North America’s Best Opera of 2021), and Comet / Poppea, commissioned by the American Modern Opera Company. He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities and lives in St. Paul with his family.

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Photo credit: Bao Phi

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