Prose Poetry Weekend Workshop with Shira Dentz

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). The question “What is a prose poem?” has been notoriously difficult to answer, and in this highly interactive online workshop, we’ll embark on an open-ended journey.

Together, we’ll plumb this textual and textural space.Each class moves through full-group discussions, independent free-write experiments, small break-out group challenges, and full-group closing shares. Activities include multi-media and sensory prompts, and guided time during which participants step away from their screens to creatively explore something new/undiscovered in their environment.

We’ll explore the history and elusive form of this form through discussion of prose poems by writers such as Francis Ponge, Rosmarie Waldrop, Claudia Rankine, Mei Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Monica Touré, Donika Kelly, and Charles Simic, and approach them as springboards for composing new prose poems. We’ll enter different portals to this liminal space, shifting our starting point from objects to metaphysics to social autobiography to the surreal. As prelude to each class, we’ll practice warm-up experiments to flex bodily sense-perceptions, language, and imagination, and we’ll conclude with an extended workshop that will give everyone the chance to refine at least one prose poem they drafted through this workshop.

YOU ONLY NEED TO PURCHASE A TICKET FOR ONE OF THE DAYS TO GAIN ADMISSION TO BOTH DAYS OF THE WORKSHOP. Pick either day and you will be registered for the full weekend.