Our workshop, while discussing the design of each workshop poem and its performance in that design, will also be concerned with matters of syntax. How far can we pull language? What ambiguities and potential exist for the poet in dislocation, elision, repetition, qualification, and delay? We’ll look at various examples of syntactic symmetry and surprise in poems by poets as diverse as Milton, Dickinson, Ronald Johnson, Langston Hughes, Kinnell, and Brigit Pegeen Kelly, in order to think about the poet’s premeditated and rote placements of words (and ideas) in sentences and across lines; about the extra force of a surprising order; about degrees of obscurity and syntactic freedom. Bring 4-5 poems (17 copies each) to the first workshop meeting. We will cover as many poems as possible in the workshop. Bring poems for which you want feedback, poems you are working on, in progress, not finished poems. I will speak with participants about poems we don’t get to, or hand back notes on those poems.
CAROL FROST’s books include Pure, Love and Scorn, Honeycomb, winner of the Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, and Entwined: Three Lyric Sequences (2014). She has received awards and honors from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Elliston Award, Poets’ Prize, and the PEN Syndication Fiction Project Awards. Her poems have been anthologized in four Pushcart Prize anthologies, and New Anthology of American Poetry, Postmodernisms, and Breaking the Jaws of Silence: 60 American Poets. Her work appears in many journals inThe Atlantic, American Poetry Review, and The New York Times. She is the Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Professor of English at Rollins College and directs Winter With the Writers.
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