Prose Poetry with Shira Dentz

Back by popular demand, Shira Dentz taught prose poetry last fall at HVWC and this class is intended both for those students who worked with her in November and new students who want to hone the craft of writing prose poetry. This one-day intensive workshop will consist of generative exercises and workshop. We’ll explore the elusive form of the prose poem through reading and discussing prose poems by poets including Francis Ponge, Rosmarie Waldrop, Claudia Rankine, and Charles Simic, and writing prompts will follow each of our discussions. Each hour we’ll enter a different portal to this liminal space, shifting our starting point from objects to metaphysics to social autobiography to the surreal. The question, “What is a prose poem?,” has been notoriously difficult to answer, and we will embark on an open-ended journey. Since form can be viewed in relation to its content, the prose poem is perhaps a most uncontained form (despite its formal regularity on the page). Together, we will plumb this textual and textural space, the nascent matter in your own generative imagination. As prelude to each day’s class, we will do warm-up sensory/language experiments to flex your bodily sense-perceptions, language, and imagination, and we will conclude on the second day with an extended workshop that will give everyone the chance to refine at least one prose poem they drafted through this workshop.

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

Shira’s forth collection, the sun a blazing zero, tracks the vibrations of a receding world that hasn’t yet entirely vanished. Its language-map moves towards intensifying a lyric field to articulate experiences that lack vocabulary, and to ride with/not rebut the noise of information-overload in contemporary psyches. A feminist assemblage, the sun a blazing zero weaves the personal and sociopolitical through shifting shutter speeds.

“At the End of the Day” and “Mango hats stood out from the rest” were published in the March 2019 issue of Poetry Magazine.

the sun a blazing zero