We are pleased to announce another Image Intensive, an opportunity to dive deeper into your craft, guided by faculty from our community who understand the unique impulses and challenges facing artists at the intersection of art and faith.

From our facilitator, A.M. Juster:

I first tried my hand at translating poetry at 15. My Latin teacher, who later went on to be a star professor and administrator at the University of Texas-Dallas, required an independent study project. Since I had been reading a lot of Shakespeare in my English class, I decided to translate one of the assigned texts, the medieval epic Waltharius, into iambic pentameter. The project went well, but it was not a revelatory experience.

Two decades later I decided to teach myself how to write formal poetry by translating short famous works into meter and rhyme. I compared my work with published versions, and started to feel I was getting good at it. Some top journals reinforced that opinion by accepting some of my translations before they started accepting my original poetry.

I picked up a solid reading knowledge of French and Latin in high school, and started studying new languages on my own; later I took classes in Italian, Middle Welsh and Old English at Tufts and Harvard. In 1999, at the urging of a future chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, I tried my first book-length translation project—and failed miserably. A few years later I finished my first book-length translation,

Horace’s Satires (University of Pennsylvania Press 2007) and I was off to the races with five more books of translated poetry. During the pandemic I went back to and finished my first project, and so W.W. Norton will publish my translation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere in April of next year.

My goal is not to turn anyone in the class into a translator or a formal poet. My goal is to try to enrich your free verse with conversations and exercises that will probably take you out of your comfort zone.

Our literary establishment looks down on traditional prosody and has not developed an alternative. One might see praise heaped upon a seemingly random line break, but never criticism of a line break. Discussion of form seems restricted primarily to easy, gimmicky poetry-like creations, such as “found poetry” and “erasure poetry.” Syllabi include little poetry before 2000 and little outside of the US, Ireland, and the UK. “Finding one’s own voice” seems paramount, but hat too often results in prosy summaries of daily life.

In this atmosphere many poets start to feel a bit lost and want to try something different, but aren’t sure how to accomplish that goal. Prompts are a popular creative stimulus, but they still leave you working through what you want to say at the same time as you are wrestling with how to say it. Translation frees you from that burden and lets you focus on how to write with new techniques, in the voices of others, and on subjects that you never would have written about on your own.

Translation can also spare you from some of the angst of standard workshop critique. Although we will do some workshopping of exercises in the second half of classes, you will in many cases be able to compare your own work with the work of experienced translators, and you can make your own judgments as to how good your work is.

My experience, and my observation of the experiences of many others, is that a good-faith effort to practice translating poetry and use the techniques of traditional prosody can be a positive stimulus for one’s own work. Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath were constantly being inventive with their poetic inheritance. Two of the stars of the 1960’s and 1970’s, Richard Hugo and Caroline Kizer, were taught in college by troubled formalist Theodore Roethke, and you can see Roethke’s influence throughout their work if you look carefully.

While it is always great to have fluency in other languages, it is not necessary for this course. I will provide you a prose “trot” for the exercises and suggestions as to how to go about your work.

Closer to the start of the class I will give you a schedule for the eight classes and a little information about our guest lecturers. I will aim to keep the classes moving briskly for ninety minutes, and will let them run over a little if that seems worthwhile.

In a small-group setting capped at 8 students, participants will experience:

• 90-minute sessions twice a week over four weeks.
• Classes led by a renowned formalist poet; world-class guest lecturers to be announced; opportunities to explore new forms and voices different from your own.
• In-depth feedback and editorial notes on one manuscript (up to six poems), to be reviewed by A.M. Juster outside of class.

This workshop is for poets of all levels. If you are seeking to learn more about formal poetry, hoping for a thorough review of your work, yearning for a compassionate writing community, or wishing for a supportive place to grow in your craft, this workshop is for you.