When Poetry Meets Prose: Prose Poem Generative Workshop with Denise Duhamel (in person at HVWC)

Russel Edson has called the prose poem “a cast-iron aeroplane that can actually fly, mainly because the pilot doesn’t seem to care if it does or not,” while the Laura Sullivan explains that the language of prose poems is for “people who don’t often get to hold the floor and know at any moment they may be cut off.” In this generative workshop we will explore prose poems as shape (think beds, billboards, mattresses, paintings), as fables, as meditations, and more. Please bring a favorite small object for the “deep image” emulation. Please also bring your sense of play. Or as Beckian Fritz Goldberg puts it, “The prose poem is like the ugliest girl at the party who is having the best time. To which I say, Party on.”

Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She and the late Maureen Seaton co-authored five collections, the most recent of which was CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). Her nonfiction publications include The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (with Julie Marie Wade, Noctuary Press, 2019). A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.