Artist Story: Francesco Levato

Francesco Levato, founder & director, Chicago School of Poetics.

The Chicago School of Poetics was created to foster innovative poetics and provide a community, both physical and online, for critical discourse and the exploration of craft. The program offers instruction in the form of visual web conferencing, as well as face-to-face workshops, and acts as a more affordable alternative to—and a community beyond—the Creative Writing MFA. CAR Literary Researcher Erica Schwanke discussed the school with founder and director Francesco Levato, who is an accomplished poet in his own right.

Who was involved in the formation of the Chicago School of Poetics? What was the driving force?

Creating an online poetry school is something that I’d been thinking about for a while and there were two main driving forces: one was addressing the need to create a poetry community where there wasn’t easy access to a metropolitan area (where this type of community might be more prevalent), and the other was to address a lack of innovative or experimental poetic strategies at the workshop level.

Writing workshops in general tend towards genres other than poetry, like memoir or fiction, and those that do offer poetry are usually geared toward introductory poetry writing. There seemed to me to be this gap—on one side, introductory workshops and the other creative writing MFA programs, with little in between for writers who may not be at the introductory level or for whom an MFA program, for financial or other reasons, might not be an option.

My own poetry tends toward the experimental and involves strategies like appropriation and documentary practice. I was often asked at readings how one begins this kind of experimentation or if I ever gave workshops based on my approach. More often than not, these types of discussion would lead towards poetry communities as I would talk about Chicago’s poetry scene, its avant aesthetic, its wealth of reading series, independent journals and presses, and the collaborative openness of its writers, artists, and performers. I find this kind of poetic/artistic community essential to my own practice and, through these after-reading discussions, began to realize the lack of opportunity for engaging with, or even finding, one's own community outside of urban centers. So, the School has its origins there. Momentum didn’t build, though, until the topic of a poetry school came up one evening at dinner with my fiancée and fellow poets Larry Sawyer and Lina ramona Vitkauskas, who are now core faculty members.

The Chicago School of Poetics offers both online and face-to-face workshops. Can you talk about what led you to offer both and how you decided to structure them and select faculty?

The name "Chicago School of Poetics" was more an attempt to situate the school in a physical location (in this case, my hometown) than in any one specific literary tradition as the School's emphasis is in online education. That being said, I think the physical workshop model of discussing your poetry face-to-face with your peers is as effective as it is challenging and so I modeled the online classroom, using video-conferencing, on that kind of interpersonal exchange. I also find the standard model of online workshops, where you either email you poems to your instructors or upload them to a forum and wait for written feedback, to be too cold, so avoiding that was another factor in modeling the School's online experience.

As far as class structure, I think the process of learning to understand the poetics of others is essential in developing your own. So we place an emphasis on the reading and lecture components of our workshops, with each class having a selected reading list on which lectures and exercises are based.

Our focus is online but we found a number of people who, for technological or other reasons, wouldn't be able to attend an online workshop. So, to address that need we decided to offer a series of on-location workshops as well.

In addition to workshops, you also offer a weekly salon. What are you hoping to offer and achieve with it?

The Weekly Salon itself was designed as a regular meeting place where you receive constructive critical feedback on your poems in progress. And the Salon's schedule and pricing structure was designed to be flexible enough to fit your own schedule and budget.

You talk about the Chicago School of Poetics as "an alternative to, and a community beyond, the Creative Writing MFA." Can you talk a little bit more about this? Or, more specifically, why you found this necessary?

As I mentioned earlier I saw a gap between introductory poetry workshops and creative writing MFA programs. With the average cost of a two-year MFA ranging from $28,000 to $74,000, I didn't see many options for someone who couldn't take on that financial burden, yet needed more than introductory classes offered. I wanted to provide an "alternative" that embodied the rigorous nature of MFA studies at a  more flexible and affordable price. And by creating an online community for those outside of urban centers, I hoped to provide the kind of community you might find in an MFA program but one that was "beyond" geographical limitations.

What can we expect from the Chicago School of Poetics in the future?

I'm developing a program for homeschooled high school students called "Poetry@Home" that's modeled on our adult classes and that focuses on key elements of poetic craft. I think our online classrooms are uniquely suited to this kind of student. The program is scheduled to launch in the 2012 school year. I'd also like to offer a study abroad program for poetry translation in the country of origin, and a series of one-day master workshops with visiting poets whose work our instructors admire and who we would like to work with ourselves.


Francesco Levato is a poet, translator, filmmaker and author of four books of poetry: Endless, Beautiful, Exact; Elegy for Dead Languages; War Rug, a book length documentary poem; and Marginal State. He has translated into English the books of Italian poets Tiziano Fratus (Creaturing), and Fabiano Alborghetti (The Opposite Shore). His work has been published internationally in journals and anthologies, both in print and online. He has collaborated and performed with various composers, including Philip Glass, and his cinépoetry has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. He is the founder and director of the Chicago School of Poetics and holds an MFA in poetry from New England College.

Interviewed in Winter 2011/12.