Join me for a one-day intensive workshop on the prose poem on Saturday, November 10. 2018, at the Hudson Valley Writer’s Center in Sleepy Hollow, NY. The day will consist of both generative experiments and workshopping, 12:30–4:30PM. You can find more details and registration information here
Writing the Prose Poem
November 10, 12:30 – 4:30pm
Hudson Valley Writers Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY
This one-day intensive workshop will consist of generative exercises and workshop. We’ll explore the elusive form of the prose poem through reading and discussing prose poems by poets including Francis Ponge, Rosmarie Waldrop, Claudia Rankine, and Charles Simic, and writing prompts will follow each of our discussions. Each hour we’ll enter a different portal to this liminal space, shifting our starting point from objects to metaphysics to social autobiography to the surreal. The question, “What is a prose poem?,” has been notoriously difficult to answer, and we will embark on an open-ended journey. Since form can be viewed in relation to its content, the prose poem is perhaps a most uncontained form (despite its formal regularity on the page). Together, we will plumb this textual and textural space, the nascent matter in your own generative imagination. As prelude to each day’s class, we will do warm-up sensory/language experiments to flex your bodily sense-perceptions, language, and imagination, and we will conclude on the second day with an extended workshop that will give everyone the chance to refine at least one prose poem they drafted through this workshop.