Summer Workshop Program 2024

Patricia Spears Jones Girds And Cables, What Holds a Poem Together July 21 to July 26, 2024 Time 9 am - 12 pm Discipline: Poetry Intermediate/Advanced On-site Housing NOT Available - Off-site Housing Options

I am a lover of bridges, so they have angled their way into this workshop description, and why not? We cross bridges every day both mindful of their structure and also indifferent. But without structure from the materials that hold up the bridge, there would be no bridge, no crossing, no journey, and no way to get to the other side. Poems transport. Poems move. And the structure of poems are often mindfully made or seemingly done unconsciously. This workshop will focus on how the poet decides to structure poems: using conventional or traditional forms or more open-ended formal devices. Poems from limericks to Olsonian odes have elements that shape the work. Each poet will generate new work and explore the ways the poem could be made in two or three different ways as a method to discover which structure best works for the poet and poem. Contemporary poetic practices allow for great diversity in work, but whether you’re writing a villanelle or exploring hybridization—words, space must find a way to hold together. A diverse range of poets and poems will be used as models and prompts. Come, hold your poems together.

Please submit 3 – 5 pages of your work to ssiegel@fawc.org by July 5.

Biography

Patricia Spears Jones is an African American poet/playwright/anthologist/activist and author of The Beloved Community (Copper Canyon) and A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems (White Pine) and nine other poetry collections. She is the Poet Laureate for New York State and recipient of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize, NEA and NYFA grants, and the Foundation of Contemporary Arts award. She is organizer of American Poets Congress and Emeritus Fellow of Black Earth Institute.