Happy New Year, Poets. Are you ready for 2022? Monday, January 3, 2022. 8:00 PM EST.
January’s monthly mini workshop will be chill and low key after the holiday bustle. As always, we post on our Lehigh Valley Poetry Facebook page and share sporadically on Instagram. (#lehighvalleypoetry and #lehighvalleypoetryvirtualsalon) The upcoming events can be found there and you can always reach out to me, E. Lynn Alexander. I manage the website, social media, etc. so hunt me down (@elynnalexander) and get in touch. The monthly mini workshop is a quick 30 minute prompt intended to be a poetry exercise, with a few intentions behind it: Exposure to a new technique or strategy, the belief that regular practice and experimentation expands our skills, and the discovery of our own writing voice by creative ricochet. If you are a poet who benefits from talking through the process, this might be for you. If you are a poet who is short on time and likes the simplicity of a “drop in” no cost, no registration style- welcome. This is meant to be a resource geared toward that feedback. -Lynn
On to this month’s topic: Prose, You say?
I recently heard somebody say that prose is writing that is not poetry. I heard somebody else say that poetry is writing that is not prose. Ok, cool. You might be a poet who doesn’t really care, you just do your thing. But wait- what is a “prose poem”?
“Prose” is more like regular speech, writing that does not seek to convey rhythm or pattern, where we aren’t concerned with the elements of poetry. The control of creative choices are not geared toward conveying effect, the construction is not really part of the “art”. Prose is writing to convey content, although it can certainly be lush and complex. Plus, I’m simplifying here as this is a “mini workshop”, after all.
We are going to dispense with “fancy structure” and try to write a poem that is in paragraph form, in regular language. It should be in an everyday style, more like speech, but have a poetic quality.
This will push us to think about the elements of each: Poetry = we might think about imagery, symbolism. Prose = we might think about ordinary language.
