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I've Been Here and Never Been Here: Writing Poems About Place and Displacement

WRITING 731.8

Explore strategies for writing poems situated in a specific space, from a small room to an entire city.

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Live Online
$0
As few as 1 day
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What you can learn.

  • Read contemporary examples of poems of place and displacement
  • Learn strategies to infuse wonder into your poems
  • Implement what you learn in class by writing a poem of your own
  • Learn to transform lived experience into compelling poems that move your reader

About this course:

How can our poems be rooted but also rootless so that they are grounded but also free? This workshop will explore strategies for writing poems that are located in a place: a room, a city, someone's arms. From there, we will explore strategies for moving beyond the place into a sense of displacement or wonder. Bring your ideas for a poem about a place or a difficult or important experience. To write creatively is to transform an experience. It can be liberating. We will read contemporary example poems of place and displacement, learn strategies to infuse wonder into your poems, write a poem of your own, and receive feedback on the poem. Participants will leave with a new poem and with strategies and ideas to write more.

Fall 2025 Schedule

Date & Time
Details
Format
 
Saturday 10:00AM - 1:00PM PT
Future Offering (Opens October 11, 2025 12:00:00 AM)
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405377
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Location: Remote Classroom
Notes

Enrollment opens two weeks prior to the event. Enrollment limited; early enrollment advised. Visitors not permitted. Internet access required.

This event will be led by special guest poet laureate Lee Herrick. Lee Herrick is the current California Poet Laureate. He is the author of four books of poems: In Praise of Late Wonder: New and Selected Poems; Scar and Flower, finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award; Gardening Secrets of the Dead; and This Many Miles from Desire. He is co-editor of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit and Afterlives: An AGNI Portfolio of Asian Adoptee Diaspora Writing. His poems appear widely, in The Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed, Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice with a foreword by Common, HERE: Poems for the Planet, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama, and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, among others.

This course is held via video teleconference. As such, instructors use Zoom to offer a live class meeting at the designated time. Students must be present at the course meeting time to participate in the class. 

Course Requirements
Internet access required to access course materials.
Schedule
Type
Date
Time
Location
Discussion
Sat Oct 25, 2025
10:00AM PT - 1:00PM PT
Remote Classroom
writers sitting in collaborate space discussing a topic

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