Please join us online at Push the Boat Out: Edinburgh's International Poetry Festival for this online craft analysis workshop with internationally celebrated poet, Jorie Graham.

Tickets are available here.

This class is dedicated to understanding the techniques that make poetry resonate. We'll explore the foundational elements of poetry, while also delving into more advanced concepts that present themselves in the two poems which we will analyse together.

About Push the Boat Out:

Push the Boat Out: Edinburghs International Poetry Festival is a vibrant and dynamic festival of poetry, spoken word, music, theatre, and visual arts. Taking over the iconic Summerhall for 3 days each November, PTBO also hosts a series of year round events, such as online workshops and a monthly open mic, Rock the Boat.

Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including To 2040 (2023), [To] the Last [Be] Human (2021), Runaway (2018) and FAST (2017) which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Her collection PLACE (2012) won the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her other Carcanet collections include Sea Change (Ecco, 2008), Never (2002), Swarm (2000), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

About her work, James Longenbach wrote in the New York Times: "For 30 years Jorie Graham has engaged the whole human contraption - intellectual, global, domestic, apocalyptic - rather than the narrow emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems. She thinks of the poet not as a recorder but as a constructor of experience. Like Rilke or Yeats, she imagines the hermetic poet as a public figure, someone who addresses the most urgent philosophical and political issues of the time simply by writing poems." Graham has also edited two anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language (1996) and The Best American Poetry 1990.

Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. In 2017 she was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.