Please join Red Mountain Press for an evening with poets Ann Filemyr, Susan Gardner, and Donald Levering

Reception and book sale to follow.

About the poets:

Saturday, July 26, 2-6pm
Sunday, July 27, 12-4pm

This class will focus on reading and writing short poems, particularly those of ten lines or less. We will look at the structure of short poems from around the world and from throughout the histories of poetry, including Classical epigrams, haiku, and Imagist lyric; discussing Catullus, Basho, and H. D., among others. Throughout our discussions and writing we’ll focus on the formal strategies—prosody, syllable count, rhyme, alliteration, image, etc.— and the kinds of detail work that allow a successful short poem to grow ever larger in our minds after we’re done reading it.

Lineation is the main design, the central idiosyncratic feature of poetry. This class stems from connections to other precincts of lineation, primarily geology: the linear structural features within rocks, called intersection, crenulation, mineral, and stretching. The re-navigation of the poetic line into the metamorphic lineation of geology is a re- orientation. Our writing exercises will emanate from this interdisciplinary crossroad, employing such inventions as junction, stress, re-direction, and parallelism.

T S Eliot wrote, “To use very strict form is a help, because you concentrate on the technical difficulties of mastering the form, and allow the content of the poem a more unconscious and freer release.” A poetic form is a little recipe, an algorithm in the history of verse. There is nothing poetic about form itself. How does one enable the content—the poetry—to flow within the strictures of a sonnet, or a sestina, or a villanelle? How does poetry result from rules and confinement? We will discuss forms and write our own poems within and outside them.