When: August 11 – September 15, 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM ESTDuration: 6 WeeksFormat: Virtual, via Zoom
Workshop Overview:
Welcome to PSNY’s Summer Virtual Intensive: Dynamics & The Creative Edge! This course will focus on the interconnected concepts of form and dynamics, and how they inform each other and add depth, dimension, and power to a written work. Form serves to greatly amplify and emphasize the nuances within a poem’s message. Dynamics like white space, line breaks, and strikethrough’s create visual and contextual interest that intensify a poem’s creative edge.
This 6-week intensive will offer writers of varying experience levels an opportunity to play with several unique, modern, and innovative forms, asking which best suits their message and what dynamics best serve to sharpen and enhance its effectiveness. Writers will engage with source materials of mixed media including texts, music, and images to expand their understanding and approach to form and dynamics, allowing them to begin crafting and honing an inventive collection of formal and technical work.
We’ll begin each session with a writing activity and a reading that explores the concepts of form, also exploring other art mediums that exemplify formal impact. Each week, an alternating group of writers will workshop each individual’s poem having submitted, read, and prepared comments for each peer’s work in advance of the week’s session.
We’ll read and discuss artists including Patricia Smith, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Gabriel Ramirez, Gail Scott, Alice Smith, Nina Simone, and others.
No prior experience required — just bring your curiosity, boldness, and love of language.
About the Instructor:
Sasha Banks is a Pushcart nominated poet and filmmaker whose work has been published or is forthcoming in THE ATLANTIC, VANITY FAIR, PBS NEWSHOUR, and others. She received her MFA at Pratt Institute. She is the director of the six-part docuseries, Oh, Country, the founder of Top Femme Media, a 2019 Rhode Island Writers’ Colony Fellow, and the creator of Poets for Ferguson. She is the author of america, MINE.
