Line Breaks: From Staccato to Legato

In this three-week intensive workshop you will create new poems and analyze craft and form. Each two-hour session will include both a craft discussion and workshopping of students' individual, newly created works. Craft talks and workshops will focus on the ideas of syntax, phrasal units, polysemy, lacunae, juxtaposition, enjambment—all in relation to the breaking of the poetic line. In addition to exploring the endless possibilities in their own work, students will study, discuss, and be exposed to the formal line-breaking techniques of poets such as Gustaf Sobin, Russell Atkins, Lorine Niedecker, Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, M. NourbeSe Philip, Myung Mi Kim, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and others. The purpose of this workshop is not to be prescriptive but instead to open up the writer to the possibilities of meaning, aesthetics, and implications to be found through the careful editing of sonic and visual arrangements in their own work.

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This class takes place remotely online via Zoom. Register to receive the link.