Participants will spend the first four weeks at The Writer?s Center writing and refining short poems, focusing on the Japanese forms of haiku and tanka, as well as American free verse. We?ll study and practice the challenges and simplicity of short poems by reading Japanese masters (Basho, Issa, Buson, Komanchi, Shikibu) as well as free verse poems by modern masters of brevity (Williams, Ryan, Clifton, Levertov, Dickinson).