Resisting Structure: Mastering the Prose Poem with John Sibley Williams
Not flash fiction, not free verse, neither fiction, memoir, or nonfiction, the prose poem is both denser and more elastic than these forms. A prose poem defies the nature of formal poetry.
Instead of being restrictive, the prose poem is permissive. Perhaps Arielle Goldberg summed it best when she wrote, “Prose poems, for me, are the best of many worlds. They give me permission to be narrative or autobiographical…non-narrative and inventive. They let me make poems that look like traditional prose, and they let me make poems with weird margins and blanks and other assorted surface oddities. They allow me to tell lies, to be abrupt, to be glib, to be wholly sincere.”
In this intensive generative workshop, we will intimately study poetry from the likes of Joy Harjo, Robert Bly, Camille Dungy, Jenn Givhan, Naomi Shihab Nye, Larry Levis, and Jose Hernandez Diaz to see how the prose poem ticks. We will look at how to structure them, how to weave both traditional and surreal narratives into them, how to craft them as letter poems, and how to subtly explore culture and politics, allowing your prose poems to question, critique, and celebrate the real world around us.
John Sibley Williams is the author of nine poetry collections, including Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Poetry Award), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), skycrape (WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). His book Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming in translation from by the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo. A thirty-five-time Pushcart nominee, John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review, Poetry Editor at Kelson Books, and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.
Truth: A Poets Raw Material with Kathy Fagan
Dickinson famously wrote: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” And Audre Lorde: “Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.” Our seminar today is based on the premise that poets, in telling their truth, weave narrative and lyric, the personal and political, autobiography and history in their poems and hybrid works. We will look specifically at work based on three, often overlapping, truth-telling categories: researching archival materials, the poetry of witness or “documentary” poetics, and the mining of deeply personal experience. Examples provided include poems or portions of poems by Layli Long Soldier, Carolyn Forche, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, and C.D. Wright, among others. We will read aloud and discuss these poems through the double lenses of “truth” and craft. Based on a study of these poems, students might go on to practice braiding techniques and other narrative strategies in their own truth-telling work.
Kathy Fagan’s new poetry collection is The Unbecoming, forthcoming from W.W. Norton, September 2026. Her sixth book, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, is Bad Hobby (Milkweed Editions, 2022), available in print and audio. Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award. Fagan’s work has appeared in venues such as The Atlantic, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Best American Poetry. Winner of the National Poetry Series, the Vassar Miller Prize, and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, she is the recipient of NEA, Ingram Merrill, Greater Columbus Arts Council, and Ohio Arts Council grants, in addition to Frost Place and MacDowell residencies. Fagan co-founded the MFA Program in Creative Writing at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, for which she served two terms as Director and over twenty years as Poetry Editor of The Journal and its annual book prize.
Class will be held on Zoom, beginning at 12:30pm ET, and last 2 hours.
The Fine Print: We’re honored to offer online craft classes with some of America’s best poet-teachers. Unless otherwise specified, classes will be held on Zoom. Classes require a minimum of 4 participants and will be capped at 10. Tuition is $150, and financial aid may be available. Details regarding cancellations and refunds can be found on our policy page. Questions? Email us at frost@frostplace.org.