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Living Room Craft Talks

In these craft talks, I present practical teachings that you’ll be able to put to use at whatever stage of development you’re at—whether you’re just beginning or are an experienced and published poet. Though these talks are focused on poetry, prose writers are welcome too.

The 6th Series

Topics are: Endings; Science and Poetry; The Things of This World; Persona Poems; Location, Location, Location; and Juxtaposition

Guest Appearances from: Billy Collins, Nikky Finney, Carolyn Forché, Maria Popova, Patricia Smith, & Arthur Sze

The 5th Series

Topics are: the Epistolary Poem, the Modern Elegy, the Sonnet, Transforming Trauma into Art, Metaphor, and Silences in Poetry

Guest Appearances from: Ada Limón, Chris Abani, Diane Seuss, Donika Kelly, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Jane Hirshfield

The 4th Series

Topics are: Sentiment & Sentimentality, Image, Line, Form, Eco-Poetry, and The Ode

Guest Appearances from: Mark Doty, Paul Tran, Jason Schneiderman, Victoria Chang, Marie Howe, and Ross Gay

Living Room Craft Talks: The Third Series

Topics are: the Turn, the Leap, Music, Dialogue, Ekphrastic Poems, and Obsessions

Guest Appearances from: Linda Gregerson, Nicole Sealey, Patricia Smith, Kwame Dawes, Danusha Laméris, and Mark Doty

Living Room Craft Talks: The Art orf Revision

Topic: Revision

Guest Appearances from: Jericho Brown, Toi Derricotte, Rick Barot, and Frank X. Gaspar

Living Room Craft Talks: The First Series

Topics are: The Art of Metaphor,
Detail and Description, Creating Tension through Multiple Pressures, Controlled Chaos, Syntax, and Discovery

Not sure what series you may be interested in? Click here for an overview of each.

Ellen’s Poetry

Indigo by Ellen Bass

Indigo

These poems, embossed with Bass’ covetable signature, play like snippets of cinema from merely every woman’s life story–moments awed by and blissfully tangled with a lover, contemplating the unrelenting hurtle of time, aging with an awkward but fiercely determined grace. Indigo is our soundtrack, finally–and its addictive and merciless music is not an option.
Patricia Smith
Indigo proves what tried and true poetry readers have always known about the living legend Ellen Bass.  These poems court the harsh realities of life with a power that suggests we can indeed overcome these realities. And the whole of this book is the testament of one who survives, but also of one who takes responsibility for whatever the cost of that survival may be:  ‘The first time you see the sun/you’re splayed on your back, the shadow/of my blade above you.’ What I love most about this book is its subtleties, the ways it plants in any reader the need to turn the page, to know more even if it means more heartbreak.  You hold in your hands the work of a sorceress at the height of her powers.
Jericho Brown
‘You may have to break/ your heart,’ writes Ellen Bass, ‘but it isn’t nothing/ to know even one moment alive.’ That complex tenant of faith underlies every poem in this superb book, an inquiry into what it is to be present in the physical world,  in time, a body in the world of bodies. Bass’s poems are surprising, tender, hungry and wide awake,  fearless in their attention to every nuance of feeling. When a young father pushes a stroller down the street, ‘tattooed from knuckle to jaw,’ she finds a figure for her own work, and names her vocation; the inked man ‘wanted/ to be in a body . . . wanted it so much/ that he marked it up like a book, underlining, /highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.’ I love this book wholeheartedly.
Mark Doty

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Like a Beggar

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The Human Line

Mules of Love

Mules of Love