Narrative poems are the most frequent type attempted, yet among the most difficult to pull off.
The material seems so clear and available to us in our heads, yet when we try to put it down in lines, we find it's far more complex and unwieldy than we originally imagined. In this workshop, students will be given a battery of exercises and techniques for generating, developing and revising narrative poems. We will also examine the work of some of the masters, contemporary and classic-Stephen Dobyns, Tony Hoagland, Marie Howe, Robert Frost, Homer, etc. This workshop is aimed at developing the kind of critical eye on your own work that forces this impossibility. All the technical aspects of poetry, from syntax to metaphor to formal considerations, will be brought to bear on Rukeyser's challenge, and the special challenges each poem raises for itself.