Long Poems & Invocations: Making The Measure Work For You
What do long poems bring out of the poet’s voice that shorter verse cannot? A lot of workshops are all about editing work down to size and keeping things concise; on this online course we will be pushing poetry to its limits and generating work over 40 lines, the cut-off point for many magazines and competitions. Over 5 months we will explore specific poems – such as Toby Martinez De Las Rivas’s ‘Twenty-One Prayers for Weak or Fabulous Things’, Lucie Brock-Broido’s ‘Domestic Mysticism’, Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’, Kate Tempest’s ‘Brand New Ancients’ – and consider why these poems work as longer poems, their tempo, tone and use of repetition, exaggeration and stylisation, and also how on a larger scale poems can work without being over-written. We’ll then work ways in and out of our own long poems, learning how to keep up the stamina it takes to keep our lines limber and flowing, and how narrative structure, lists, meditations on reflective ideas, incantations, and invoking the mystical and metaphysical can yield grand results.
This is a private group. To join you must be a registered site member and request group membership.