The lyric poem serves as both spectacle and vehicle. Readers ride along with the speaker of the poem, hopefully learning something about what it means to be alive in this moment. Often it is the risks we take as poets that make our best poems sing. If we truly open ourselves, we can invite moments of risk to rise out of our form, figure, style, tone, and more. In this workshop we will look at the contemporary lyric poem and consider skills and devices that invite more radiance into our own poems, especially as it relates to unlocking the next phase of our progress as poets and building toward a sequence or book-length manuscript. 

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Christopher Salerno is the author of five books of poetry. His most recent book, “The Man Grave,” won the Lexi Rudnitsky Award from Persea Books. Previous books include “Sun & Urn” (UGA Poetry Prize), “ATM” (Georgetown Poetry Prize), “Minimum Heroic” (Mississippi Review Poetry Prize), and “Whirligig”. His trade book, “How to Write Poetry: A Guided Journal,” is available from Calisto Media. His work has received the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, The Founders Prize from RHINO Magazine, the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Award, the Laurel Review Chapbook Prize, and a New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowship. His poems have appeared in New York Times Magazine, New Republic, American Poetry Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. He teaches in the B.A. and M.F.A programs in Creative Writing at William Paterson University in New Jersey where he serves as Director of Writing Across the Curriculum.