Living Room Craft Talks

Living Room Craft Talks
The First Series

with Ellen Bass

Online as a Self-Guided Series

If you want to learn more about the strategies that you can employ to write poems that are more vivid, arresting, meaningful and complex, this series may be what you have been looking for.

In these 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. If you write memoir or fiction, you will find that this precise attention to language will enrich your work as well.

• 12+ Total Hours of Talks
• 100+ PDF Pages of Example Poems
• PDF Resource Guides and Book Lists
• 90 Days Viewing Time
• Optional: Download and Watch Offline

Poetry is rooted in metaphor, in which we see the similarity, the oneness, in disparate things. Metaphor works to create vivid descriptions, to enact emotional authenticity, to make order from chaos, and to forge a bond between the poet and the reader. We’ll explore the power of metaphor in bringing images and ideas to life and study how metaphor works in a variety of poems. I’ll present strategies for creating more exciting, illuminating, and moving metaphors and give suggestions for ways that you can use metaphor more effectively in your own writing.

Tolstoy said, “Art is transferring feeling from one heart to another.” And E.L. Doctorow said, “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader–not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” That is our job description. But how do we go about this work of transferring feeling? How do we write poems and stories that make the reader feel the rain? Fortunately, one of the main ways is very concrete. We create a physical and emotional impact through precise detail and description, fresh metaphors and images. We’ll look at poems that employ striking detail and description and I’ll offer guidance on how to practice this in your own poems.

Tension is a fundamental driving force that moves us to change and it is at the heart of virtually all persuasion. The first task of a writer is to persuade the reader to keep reading. Then we want the poem to matter to the reader, to be memorable. How do we engage the reader and hold their interest? We’ll look at a large number of specific techniques that you can use to create tension—including the length of the line, the relationship between the sentence and the line, the relationship between the expected rhythm and the variation, pacing, juxtaposition, dissonance between the subject and the language, the unsaid, associative leaps, unexpected diction, irony, location, contrast, and more. With examples from a wide variety of poets, as well as some prose writers, we’ll increase our grasp of the methods that we can use to create tension.

A certain kind of poem reaches out a long arm and sweeps disparate, unexpected things into its net. It scoops in a great deal of material that is more or less obviously related. It doesn’t hug the shore. It doesn’t walk a narrow line. It retains a kind of wildness. It can seem untamed. And yet all the elements have enough magnetic or gravitational attraction, enough resonance, that the writing feels organically whole. To write this kind of long-armed poem, to allow the tension and passion of chaos into our writing, we have to open the doors. We have to be willing to be surprised, even shocked. We’ll look at examples of the long-armed poem and I will talk about how you might experiment with bringing more controlled chaos into your own writing.

Syntax—the order of the words, the architecture of the sentence–can be varied in a multitude of ways. Syntax can be natural, conversational. Or it can diverge from the way we commonly speak, utilizing unexpected order, repetitions, juxtapositions, and fractured phrases. Sentences can be short, long, simple, complex. They can be graceful, halting, broken, languid, tense. What is necessary is that the syntax works with the meaning of the poem to deliver an experience to the reader. The more conscious we are about sentence patterns, the more possibilities are available to us. By studying a few poems with very different syntactical structures, we’ll see how syntax can affect the pacing of a poem, intensify the emotional impact, and startle us into deeper understanding. I’ll suggest some specific syntactical forms that you can experiment with to increase the power of your poems.

Almost every poet who writes about poetry talks about discovery because this dive into the unknown is at the center of a memorable poem. It’s not enough to report—even beautifully–what we already knew before we began to write the poem. Instead, we want the experience to reveal itself, to be enacted, within the poem itself. In order for this to happen, we have to let go of the story we know in order to find out more about ourselves and the world. The challenge is to be curious about what the poem wants to tell us, to be the servant of the poem. We’ll look closely at different ways a poem can open up into discovery. And we’ll explore approaches to push into our own uncharted territory in order to write poems that take us where we’ve never been before.

Technical Format for the Series:

The Living Room Craft Talks: The First Series was originally recorded as a Zoom craft talk series. Now, it is available as a self-guided, multimedia series that is available online through a participant-only portal on this website.

Your Registration Email:

The email address that you enter into the billing information on the following registration pages will be the email address that is sent your confirmation email. If you wish the series materials to be sent to a different email address than the one you use for billing, please email Jen at jen@ellenbass.com and provide her with the alternative email address.

While signing up for this talk series you will be asked to be added to Ellen’s email list (this is how all of the talk series information is sent). You are able to cancel your subscription to Ellen’s email list at any time, but please keep in mind that if you cancel your subscription before all of the talk series emails are sent you will not receive those final talk emails.

Emails About This Series and Your Registration:

Once your registration payment has been processed, you will be sent an automated email from jen@ellenbass.com confirming your spot in the series and giving you important information to access the series materials. If that email does not reach you within 1 hour, please check your spam, junk, promotions, or trash folders as the email could have been misdirected.

All emails about this series are sent automatically from jen@ellenbass.com. To make sure that you receive those emails, which include a confirmation with details on how to access the series materials, please add jen@ellenbass.com to your contact list before you register. Not sure how? Click the button below.

Please read through the details for each of the registration options so that you are clear about the differences between them.

If you have questions about the Downloadable edition and whether your device will be able to download the talks, please read the Downloading Tips and FAQs.

Full and partial scholarships available for BIPOC writers and individuals with financial need for Extended Access only. If the price is a hardship, please email Jen at jen@ellenbass.com and tell us in 2-3 sentences what your circumstances are and what, if anything, you could pay.

Questions and Concerns:

If you have any questions or concerns, please email Jen at jen@ellenbass.com.

Cancellations and Refunds:

If within 72 hours of purchasing the Downloadable Edition you find that you cannot download the craft talks, contact Jen and she can move your registration to the Extended Access option and refund you the difference. No other refunds are offered.