An Online Workshop – Sunday, October 20, 2024, 2:30 – 5 pm EST
This class will explore the defining characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses of three modes of poetry: narrative, lyric, and meditative. (Or, “story elements, feeling elements, and thinking elements.”) Through close readings of several poems, we’ll examine how these modes combine into hybrid modes, in which each mode supplies qualities that the others lack.
To strengthen our ability to recognize each of the modes in action (and to add this recognition as a skill to our revision toolbox), the class will include a brief “mode mapping” exercise, in which we’ll locate the modes as they operate and overlap in a particular poem.
No craft class can solve every craft challenge, but this class seeks nothing less than to provide a framework for identifying every kind of gesture a poem can make. This can empower you to look at your drafts with an editor’s eye, asking, “Now that I know what this element is, how is it relating to the other elements, and is it operating as I hope?”
This Zoom workshop is open to writers at all levels, and limited to ten students. Registrants will receive the Zoom link to the email address they use to register. Please review the course policies page before registering for any class. Email pdonnelly@frostplace.org with questions.
About the Instructor
Patrick Donnelly is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Little-Known Operas (Four Way Books, 2019) and the forthcoming Willow Hammer (Four Way Books, spring 2025). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, Slate, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, and many other journals. Donnelly is program director of The Frost Place (Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, NH, now a center for poetry and the arts), and directs the online annual Poetry Seminar there. He has taught at Smith College, Colby College, the Lesley University MFA Program, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, Slate, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, and many other journals.