Introducing The Chicago School of Poetics

The title says it all, so let's get to some brass tacks. All of this information comes from The Chicago School of Poetics ("An alternative to, and a community beyond, the Creative Writing MFA") website.

The Chicago School of Poetics is dedicated to fostering innovative poetics and providing a community, both physical and online, for critical discourse and the exploration of craft.

Our program offers instruction not found elsewhere: visual web conferencing, as well as face-to-face workshops, which allow students to get inside the actual writing process of the core faculty. Many MFA programs have instructors who take a very traditional approach to teaching. The Chicago School of Poetics is for those who have already read every anthology and still feel the need for more specialized instruction. At low cost, the school offers innovative, structured, relevant, and exciting coursework; a genuine community even for poets who live many miles from Chicago; weekly salons involving face-to-face critique; and a receptive, friendly environment that delivers useful feedback that is based solely on the merits of the work. The Chicago School of Poetics takes students beyond what they might have thought possible in a positive and community-building environment.

The School's faculty consists of these mostly Chicago-based poets: Joanna Penn Cooper, Steve Halle, Francesco Levato, Larry Sawyer, J. Hope Stein, and Lina ramona Vitkauskas.

Their On Location Workshops consist of two levels of Poetics courses and Dream Journaling. The On-Line Workshops offer more variety, from "Documentary Poetics" to "Risk: Writing At The Edge" to "The Poetry of Cubism".