Is There A Plot In This Poem?: A Generative Poetry Workshop with Alexis Sears (on Zoom)

Although the word “plot” is mostly associated with fiction, it appears in poetry more often than you’d think. A plot is more than a story— it’s a deep dive into why a sequence of events occurs. In this workshop, we will examine how plot finds its way into poems: the drama it contributes to poetic elements, the relationship between a poet’s own identity and the poem’s speaker’s actions, and the possibilities emergent when plot is coupled with poetic fragmentation. In discussions about crossing genre boundaries, we will read hybrid modes of writing (such as prose poetry and excerpts of novels in verse) and explore the benefits and downsides of labeling works of art!

Alexis Sears is the author of Out of Order, winner of the 2021 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and the Poetry by the Sea Book Award: Best Book of 2022. Her work appears in Best American Poetry, Poet Lore, Cortland Review, Cimarron Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her BA in Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University. Editor-at-Large of the Northwest Review and Contributing Editor of Literary Matters, she lives in Los Angeles.