Prose to Poetry Workshop (Dec 17)

From Prose to Poetry

(+Holiday Haiku)

If you’ve been in my editing class before, you might’ve seen me turn a piece of prose into a poem. But it’s more than a parlor trick. Learning to transform most anything you write into a poem can help you generate a ton of new material. It might even change the way you approach your work.

To prepare for this workshop, students will bring a short piece of prose – a journal entry, a piece of fiction, whatever you like really – and read them aloud. We’ll give some commentary afterwards, but we’ll also practice extracting poems from these pieces. Maybe even more than one! Zoom may have its faults, but the magic of screen-share will allow us to literally be on the same page together as we explore the possibilities.

After the main course, we’ll have a little dessert, a “holiday bonus.” As you may know, haiku is a form dear enough to me that I went ahead and wrote a book of ‘em. I’d love to spread some of the love I have for haiku to you. We’ll discuss the ins and outs of the form, maybe even touch on some of the history and read a few examples from the Greats – but most importantly, we’ll write some haiku as an in-class exercise, and share them before we sign off.