Online workshop.

Typically, the principle of “Show, don’t tell” is sound advice for poets—we should aim to evoke and enact emotion, to surprise through imagery and sensory detail. In this generative workshop, though, we will explore how we might use “telling” in beautiful, unexpected, and politically engaged ways. We will examine modes and moods of “telling,” like the discursive, the aphoristic, the bold remembering, the conversationally witty, the necessarily strange challenge to the normative. Writing experiments will occur in between discussion of model poems. We will consider how it is often a fresh combination of the abstract and the concrete that creates a new, startling connection in the reader’s mind. Participants can expect to generate at least three new pieces.