Sudden Prose: Exploring Prose Poetry & Flash Fiction
Elevate your prose poetry game, as we dive into the specifics and peculiarities of prose poems and flash fiction.
What really is a prose poem, and how does it differ from flash fiction? What makes one prose poem or flash fiction better than another? This course will strengthen understanding of both forms offering writers new vehicles for lyric and narrative ideas. In prose poetry, we’ll look at poems by Claudia Rankine, Ian Seed, Charles Simic, Russell Edson, Nina Mingya Powles, and Michael Donaghy, among others, and consider the roles of voice, musicality, sentence structure, imagery, and the lyric. With flash fiction, we’ll discuss stories by Kathy Fish, Sara Hills, Dave Eggers, Jamaica Kincaid, K.B. Carle, and Susmita Bhattachaya, and look at structure, characterisation, pacing, and narrative. Throughout, we’ll be discussing the slippage between the forms, the places where poetry and fiction blur.
With a stronger appreciation of the elements of each form comes a better understanding of how to critique and improve further drafts, which we’ll apply in our feedback sessions. With a view toward supporting one’s work in these forms into the future, the course will conclude with a look toward the unique opportunities for publishing prose poetry and flash fiction and the active international communities burgeoning around them.
Concessions & Accessibility
To apply for a concession rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected].
What to Expect
Please check the left hand side of this page for information on how this course works in practice, under the heading ‘Course Style‘. If you’re unsure as to what any of the terms there mean, or if this course is a good fit for you, please visit our What to Expect page which includes some further information on how our courses function.
Image credit: @ricdeoliveira
About Carrie Etter 
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Carrie Etter has published five collections of poetry, most recently Grief’s Alphabet (Seren, 2024), and a chapbook of flash fiction, Hometown (V. Press, 2018). Individual poems have appeared in Boston Review, The New Republic, The New Statesman, Poetry London, Poetry Review, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other journals and anthologies internationally. She has received grants from the Society of Authors, Arts Council England, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and she is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Bristol. She taught The Poetry School’s first ever prose poetry course in 2005.
"I might have written this before but I find Poetry School is something that I can always return to for nourishment, learning and inspiration."
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