Poetry Workshop Session 2

ep•i•logue Books Poetry Workshop led by Alan Kellner

New to Poetry? Great! This workshop is for anyone interested in poetry. No experience reading or writing poetry is required.

Poetry reader? Great! If you already read poetry, this workshop can help you grow in your appreciation of poems by learning more about how poems are written.

Anxious about Writing Poetry? If you are interested in writing your own poems but are nervous to take your first steps, this workshop will help you become more comfortable with writing poetry – without actually writing!

Over the course of four sessions, participants will read poetry in a variety of forms from a diversity of voices in a casual and encouraging atmosphere. Participants will grow as readers of poetry not only by reading and discussing poems but by engaging in ‘almost-writing’ exercises, aimed to help participants get a peek behind the scenes on the craft of writing poetry. Participants will leave the workshop enriched with a passion for poems and a new appreciation for them by being able to read like a writer. The workshop might even help nudge participants gently toward trying their own hand at writing some poetry – or not.

In workshop exercises participants will be ‘almost-writing.’ They will be almost writing poetry on their own – but not quite. The workshop’s exercises engage writing in various ways without any of the barriers writers face: No blank pages, no lack of ideas, no worries about originality. By eliminating the common barriers of writing, my hope is that participants will have fun (almost)writing.

Workshop exercises will have participants:

· experiment with modifying existing poems to learn about line breaks

· playfully construct a new poem from words they find in the books at ep•i•logue

· inject their own personality into an already existing poem mad-lib style

May 21st - June 18th - July 16th - August 20th

7:00pm – 8:30pm

Cost: $35, includes all four sessions