Introduction & Welcome

Welcome to Clark University's Creative Writing Workshop Blog!

This year students will be posting poems that they have written along with mini-reviews of their peers' work. In addition, we will include photos of art work that will be part of the collaboration between the poets and the sculptors on campus. In the spring semester, we hope to have a live stream-audio option where you can hear poems read by their authors...so stay tuned.

A note of explanation about this blog, Kangaroos & Sequins: A Poetry Workshop:

The title of this blog is taken from a Frank O'Hara poem, "Today." The poem addresses the things of our everyday--and not so everyday--that come in to poems that make them both a "surprise" and "strong as rocks." It is my hope that our poems in this blog are trying to do both. With that said, dear readers, we are all students of poetry here and as such, working and crafting and reaching towards "the things [that] are with us every day." Thank you for reading the work and for your participation as another part of our audience.

Warm regards,

Professor Lea Graham


Today

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they've always talked about

still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They're strong as rocks.

--Frank O'Hara, from The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara