Join me in this live, two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about the ways that poets can bring desire to the page with heat, precision, mystery, and verve.

Hi, everyone. I’m Maya C. Popa, and I’m the poetry editor at Publishers Weekly, founder of the online writing platform Conscious Writers Collective, and author of three books of poetry, including the forthcoming collection, If You Love That Lady. I want to invite you to my upcoming class, Five Things I’ve Learned About Writing Desire.”

“Whoever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it.” That’s one of Anne Carson’s chief insights about desire from her seminal work Eros, The Bittersweet, published in 1986. The ancient Greek poet Sappho first called eros, or desire, “bittersweet,” and who can’t relate to that? Carson likens it to “running breathlessly, but not yet arrived…a suspended moment of living hope.” 

“In running breathlessly, but not yet arrived,” we hear the charge of desire—its arresting in-between and incompleteness that propels us forward. Any poet hoping to write on desire must be able to capture something at once consuming and impermanent, delicate and muscular, something as layered and complex as we are. 

In this session, I want to explore five poems with you that take on the subject of desire, from Robert Hass’s spectacular “Meditation at Lagunitas,” which contains the unforgettable lines, “Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances,” to Melissa Crowe’s sexy, funny, and wholly delightful “When We’re in Bed and You Take Out Your Mouth Guard, I Know It’s On,” to the hard-earned wisdom of Derek Walcott’s “Love After Love.”  For each poem, we will examine the approaches that poets take to articulating desire without sentimentality. We’ll consider how figurative devices, syntax, and pacing shape the poem’s emotional landscape and discuss strategies for bringing desire to the page with heat and precision, with mystery and verve. And we will enjoy spending the last half hour writing and sharing our own early desire-driven drafts, applying the lessons and strategies we have crystalized through our close reading and discussion.  

If you’re only a casual reader of poetry, great! You will come away with a deeper appreciation for five new poems and hopefully some insights you might not otherwise have considered without our group discussion. If you’re just beginning to write poetry, you will have a chance to review some poetic terms in action before working on your own. 

Please join me as we explore the prismatic facets of desire together and expand the range of what is possible in our own writing.

-Maya C. Popa

We’re pleased to offer this class in partnership with Conscious Writers Collective, the online writing platform and global writing community designed around the belief that rigorous writing instruction, a dedicated community of writers, and opportunities to learn from visiting experts should not be exclusive to an MFA. Find out more, and join CWC Poetry or CWC Fiction.