ORP workshops: Prose Poetry

Three Hours Every Sunday
10am - 1pm Eastern Time
Scholarships Available

The prose poem is a genre that exists at the borders of poetry, flash fiction, and the lyric essay. Abandoning the line allows a poem the elasticity to reach the margins of the page and the discursive space to articulate the realities of marginalization. Taking our guidance from models of contemporary prose poets like Danez Smith, Joy Harjo, Dawn Lundy Martin, Claudia Rankine, and Anne Carson, we will write and revise a series of prose poems during this ten-week workshop. The bulk of our time will be devoted to respectfully workshopping each others’ poems with the goal of revising them for publication.

 
In keeping with ORP’s mission, this workshop seeks to bring together a diverse array of voices to harness the power of artistic expression to disrupt the cycles of hegemonic oppression. We will play with the sentence and the paragraph to explore and stretch the limits of their abilities as genre. If the line is connected with breath, what happens when it is not there? When there is no breath, when you can’t breathe? These are some of the questions we will attempt to answer.

Workshop Goals

Creative – Generate a suite of new prose poems. Have a portfolio of prose poems ready for submission for publication

Intellectual – Develop an intimate understanding of prose poetry, the limits of poetry as a genre and current trends in poetic writing

Social – Foster a community of writers to provide feedback, support and companionship during a time of isolation. Thinking together and creating together

Here are some of the themes we will touch on:

The Poetics of Prose
What is prose poetry? How does it differ from flash fiction and micro-nonfiction? What is the line? What is poetry?

History of Prose Poetry
Origins in Japan, French resurgence, Modernism with a capital M, prose poetry and social justice

The Line vs The Sentence
What is the function(s) and the form of the sentence vs the line?

Line and Breath
The function(s) of the poetic line, punctuation, breath

Lyricism of the Essay
The close relationship between the academic essay and the prose poem. Intertextuality in/as Lyric

The Fractured Line and the Intact Sentence
The geopoetics of the line in poetries of conflict (like Partition Poetry). What happens when you force the sentence to remain unbroken?

The Prose Poem in Black America
The African American tradition of prose poetry, #BlackLivesMatter and the prose poem, prose poetry and the Beats

The Contemporary Publishing Landscape
Places to publish. Preparing a submission packet. Cover letters and what is expected. Publishing resources: pw.org, submittable, Duotrope

The workshop is capped at 12 participants. In keeping with the decolonial and antiracist goals of the workshop, we strongly encourage poets from marginalized communities to join and self-identify in the sign-up form.

If you have any questions or need any accommodations, please email us at evpoetry.orp@gmail.com