Endings can be tricky. How does one end a poem? Are there strategies for knowing when to leave a poem alone? Alternatively, are there ways to extend the life of a poem and avoid closure altogether? How does the eventual finitude of our human lives and the planet influence our poetic endings? How, in poetry, can we use the end of an event, day, or thought to remember, reflect, open, or close a portal?

In this workshop, we will dive into poetic closure by encountering a wide range of famous poetic farewells, fade-outs, and final hours. Together, we’ll discuss the ones that leave us in tears, on fire, or full of hope, while simultaneously writing our own, hopefully messy, endings.

In an effort to answer these questions and write our own endings to poems, we’ll read and discuss a wide range of texts that approach them differently, including but not limited to poems by Lucille Clifton, Bernadette Mayer, Emily Dickinson, Harryette Mullen, and Ana Božičević. Additionally, we might read poet and scholar Lyn Hejinian’s essay “The Rejection of Closure”; Euripides’ play Iphigenia at Aulis; watch Stephen Sondheim’s “The Last Midnight,” as sung by Bernadette Peters in Into the Woods; or perhaps even revisit children’s books such as Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon and Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends.

Finally, together, we’ll figure out how to conclude our workshop—what goodbye ritual can we perform?

The End: A Poetry Workshop | Led by Ariel Yelen