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Poetry Master Class with Patrick Donnelly


Layering Story, Feeling, and Thinking Elements: How Understanding the Three Modes of Poetry Can Help Us Write and Revise Our Own Poems with Patrick Donnelly

This workshop will explore the defining characteristics, strengths and weaknesses of three modes of poetry: story (narrative), feeling (lyric), and thinking (meditative). We’ll examine, though close readings of several poems, how these modes can—and should!—combine into hybrid modes, in which each mode supplies qualities that the others lack.

We’ll ask the question: if you were to give a close, objective reading to your own work as a whole, which of the three modes would you say is in the foreground? Telling stories, feeling about stories, or thinking about stories? Put another way, toward which of the modes do you seem most temperamentally inclined or which comes easiest for you? Likewise, which of the modes do your poems put in the background (as a deliberate strategy or unconsciously), and/or which do you need to work hardest to include?

To strengthen our ability to recognize each of the modes in action, we’ll do a “mode mapping” exercise, in which we’ll locate the modes as they operate and overlap in a particular poem. We’ll also do some writing in which we deploy strategies from missing modes into single-mode passages. You’ll leave this workshop with a powerful tool for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of your own drafts.

Tickets for this 4-hour intensive course are $124. Please register at
https://www.writerscenter.org/calendar/donnelly/

**NYC writers: the HVWC is a short, scenic train ride on Metro North’s Hudson line. We are located immediately at the Philipse Manor RR station. No car needed! Join us!

Event Location and Ticket Information

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Hudson Valley Writers’ Center
300 Riverside Drive
Sleepy Hollow, NY 10591
Handicap Accessible? Yes

Date: Saturday, October 26, 2019
Times: 12:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Ticket pricing:

Get tickets now
- $124

Presenter: Hudson Valley Writers Center
Presenter Phone: 9143325953