Form & Fracture: A Poetry Workshop
Constraint as liberation. Writing in and against form.
Instructor
Rosa Delgado
Starts
February 2, 2026
Ends
March 27, 2026
Price
$550
Cohort Size
Up to 12 writers
About This Course
Form is not restriction. It's pressure—and pressure makes the poem.
This workshop moves through received forms (sonnet, villanelle, ghazal, pantoum) and then breaks them apart to build something new. We'll ask what each form wants and what happens when you refuse.
Reading list is heavy on Terrance Hayes, Claudia Rankine, Ocean Vuong, and the Oulipo writers.
Instructor
Rosa Delgado
Rosa Delgado is a poet whose collections have won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and teaches at NYU.
Syllabus
- 01Week 1 — The sonnet as argument
- 02Week 2 — Repetition: villanelle, pantoum, ghazal
- 03Week 3 — Workshop round one
- 04Week 4 — Constraint and the Oulipo mode
- 05Week 5 — The long poem and the sequence
- 06Week 6 — Final workshop + submission strategy
What the Workshop Looks Like
Anonymized notes from a real cohort session. This is the level of feedback you can expect.
“The villanelle is doing what villanelles do: the repetition is accumulating pressure. But the two refrains aren't in tension with each other yet — they're agreeing. The form wants them to collide. Right now they're just circling the same feeling from slightly different angles.”
Instructor note, Week 2
“The turn in the ninth line is where the poem earns itself. Everything before it is setup; everything after it is consequence. The problem is the turn is buried in a subordinate clause. Let it have a line.”
Cohort note, Week 2
“I want the constraint to feel like pressure, not decoration. Right now the form is sitting on top of the content. What would it look like to let the form crack the content open — to make the restriction do something the poem couldn't do in prose?”
Cohort note, Week 4