Meet Your Summer Mentor: Adrienne
Topic: Poetry of Future
What does poetry that is being written today look and sound like? We’ll read poems by a constantly evolving range of poets who writing books, chapbooks, Internet poems, slam poetry, prose poetry, randomly generated poems, flarf, and more. And as we read, we'll write. We’ll experiment with very old types of poetry—nursery rhymes, folktales, ballads, charms, riddles, chants—and we’ll experiment with new forms, like Twitter verse and the poem as gif. We’ll break the rules, and we’ll invent new ones.
Adrienne Raphel, PhD candidate in English - Harvard University
When Adrienne was seven years old, she published her first book, The Pretty Girl Who Was Smart and the Beautiful Girl Who Was Stupid, and she’s had ink on her fingers ever since. Adrienne attended Princeton, majoring in English and creative writing and graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Her thesis on riddles and nonsense verse received the Thomas B. Wanamaker English Language Thesis Prize, and she was awarded several poetry prizes for her creative work. After Princeton, she headed to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. She’s now a PhD candidate in English at Harvard, studying poetry and history of the language.
In addition to juggling her creative and scholarly writing, Adrienne has worked as an editor of fiction books and business books. She’s developed creative writing programs for students and has edited many application essays. Adrienne delights in working with students, writers, scholars, and professionals to help them refine and develop their craft. She has helped countless students with their medical school applications, and knows the process inside and out.
In her spare time, you can usually find her running, swimming, doing crossword puzzles, or playing Boggle – occasionally all at once.
Interview with Adrienne
(1) Why are you excited to mentor this topic?
I'm excited to teach a mentorship in Poetry of the Future because I can't wait to hear what you have to say! We'll be inventing and creating all the time: this is a process of constant exploration. It won't be easy, since you'll find yourself in unfamiliar turf at all turns, but it's guaranteed to be a thrilling ride.
(2) What inspired you to pursue this interest?
I've been writing poems since before I can remember, but I first realized how exhilarating poetry could be when I was in high school. My English teacher organized monthly poetry slams, and we all scribbled furiously to read our creations to each other in a dark corner of the student center. But I also learned what poetry could do by exposing myself to as much as I could. The more I read, the more my brain exploded: I didn't even know it was possible to feel these things, let alone get others to feel them through my writing.
(3) What will I get out of this mentorship?
In this mentorship, we'll be reading and writing all the time. You'll discover poets who are writing all over the world today, and you'll figure out what you can steal from them. (As T.S. Eliot once said, "Good writers borrow, great writers steal.") You'll produce chapbook of your own poetry, in digital, print, or both, that will serve as the capstone of our summer and the launchpad for your poetry career.