Author of six books: A Summer Evening (winner of the Colorado Prize, 2001); Water’s Leaves & Other Poems (winner of the Verse Prize, 2005); Christopher Sunset (winner of the 2011 Sheila Motton Book Award); The Rose of January (Wave Books, 2013); Cities At Dawn (Wave Books, 2016), and Giant Moth Perishes (Wave Books, 2021) and his work has also appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, Granta, Fence, and New York Review of Books. Geoffrey studied poetry at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where he was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize by Mark Strand. He has collaborated with many artists, including the composers Brent Arnold and Brandon Scott Rumsey. He recently traveled in China, visiting universities and schools and giving lectures, workshops, and readings as a participant in the Sun Yat-sen University Writers’ Residency. Geoffrey’s poems have been translated into Spanish, French, Russian, and Mandarin. Soir d’été, a bilingual edition of his poems translated into French by poets Molly Lou Freeman and Julien Marcland, was recently published in France. SLC, 2024–
Graduate Courses 2024-2025
MFA Writing
Craft of Poetry: Under Pressure/Fields of Play
Craft—Fall
WRIT 7115
In this craft seminar, I want to look at works where a poet or artist takes a form or medium or idea and puts pressure on it with nearly tedious and childlike focus and fascination, on a circumscribed field of play, and in the process discovers and learns and broadens horizons of the possible. Picasso’s images of women at the fountain; Jennifer Bartlett’s painting series, “Rhapsody”; Erik Satie’s “Vexations”; Rene Gladman’s Plans for Sentences; Darger’s Realms of the Unreal; Giacometti’s portrait-painting process; Keats’s 4,000 pentameter lines in Endymion; Stevens’s “Sea Surface Full of Clouds” and “Study of Two Pears”; Messiaen’s Vingt Regards…all of these works do something very exciting. They start with a limited form or an idea or an image or a medium, small in size and circumscribed in scope—often something that they are compelled by or obsessed with—and put pressure on it through repetition, variation, and play. In the process, they create patterns and extend them, raise expectations and disappoint them; they experiment with their medium, offer us the promise of a resolution that is held out then subsequently denied and altered. What does this mean for us? In daily writing, we will do our own versions of this: Find a word or image, form or idea, problem, or memory that fascinates us or compels us and then put pressure on it by writing a certain kind of line a thousand times or using an image or form over and over until it breaks and rebuilds—always, in the process, learning how to surprise ourselves and the reader and make discoveries about our process, our craft, and ourselves. We will no doubt touch on issues of the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity, the perceiver and the world as perceived, and, importantly, how pressure and variation can make a poem move and live—possibly the most essential thing that we can learn in poem-making. I am very excited about what we will make in this class, and I hope you will join me.