F145.
Heroic Crowns: On the Values of Difficulty and Dazzle
Friday, February 9, 2024
10:35 am to 11:50 am
Notoriously hard to write, the heroic crown is a tightly linked sequence of fifteen sonnets that offers poets a chance to prove their virtuosity on the page. In this panel, five sonneteers who have enlarged the tradition of the heroic crown will discuss a range of strategies for approaching the form. Through an examination of techniques such as extended metaphor, lyric fragmentation, and formal flexibility, they will provide tools that other poets can employ when attempting their own heroic crowns.
Participants
Matt W. Miller is the author of Tender the River, The Wounded for the Water, Club Icarus, and Cameo Diner. A winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize, The Trifecta Poetry Prize, and fellowships from Stanford University and the Sewanee Writers Conference, he teaches and lives in coastal New Hampshire.
Laurie Ann Guerrero is the author of A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying, A Crown for Gumecindo, and I Have Eaten the Rattlesnake. San Antonio Poet Laureate (2014) and Texas Poet Laureate (2016), she is an associate professor of poetry and gender studies at Texas A&M University-San Antonio.
Alexis Sears is the author of Out of Order, winner of the 2021 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and the Poetry By the Sea Book Award: Best Book of 2022. She earned her BA at Johns Hopkins University and her MFA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been widely published in literary journals.
Chelsea Woodard
