It’s tricky to write about the ones we adore. Love poems come with a flood of unfortunate expectations: sentimentality, clunky metaphors, clichés, rhyming couplets, and Greek gods. How can we write love poems that are “real”—containing all the thorny textures and discomforts and uncertainties of an actual relationship? How can we make our love poems complicated, nuanced, wild, dark, while also keeping (respectful) focus on the “object of desire”? In this session, you’ll learn some skills that will help you approach this much-trodden road with freshness and innovation. We’ll look at some terrific examples, and you’ll write a few poems of your own.

JOHN WALL BARGER’s poems and critical writing have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and Best of the Best Canadian Poetry. His fifth book, Resurrection Fail, came out with Spuyten Duyvil Press in fall 2021. He is a contract editor for Frontenac House, and teaches in the BFA Program for Creative Writing at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. For more about John Wall Barger, please visit: johnwallbarger.com.