Living Room Craft Talks: The Sixth Series

Living Room Craft Talks
The Sixth Series

With Ellen Bass
and Guest Poets Billy Collins, Nikky Finney, Carolyn Forché, Maria Popova, Patricia Smith, & Arthur Sze

90-Days Access
A Self-Guided Online Series

You do not need to have taken the previous Living Room Craft Talks to take this series.

If you want to learn more about the strategies you can employ to write poems that are vivid, engaging, meaningful and complex, I’d be delighted to have you join me in the Living Room Craft Talks: The Sixth Series. If you haven’t attended the previous talks, that’s fine. Each series is independent.

I’ll be presenting practical teachings that you’ll be able to put to use at whatever stage of development you’re at—whether you’re just beginning, somewhere in the great middle, or are an accomplished and published poet.

The topics for this series are: Endings; Science and Poetry; The Things of This World;  Persona Poems; Location, Location, Location; and Juxtaposition.

We’ll be reading exemplary poems from a large and diverse group of poets. And there will be guest appearances from: Billy Collins, Nikky Finney, Carolyn Forché, Maria Popova, Patricia Smith, and Arthur Sze!

As we study each week’s subject, we’ll also examine other essential aspects of the craft, including image, syntax, form, diction, music and tone.

These talks are focused on poetry, but prose writers are welcome. The precise attention to structure and language will enrich your work as well.

Guest Poet: Maria Popova

Poetry and science are allies, not opposites.
Both are instruments of discovery,
and together they make the two feet of one walking.
—Jane Hirshfield

Poetry and science share a way of exploring the world with curiosity and rigor. They have so many things in common: they invite us to engage our sense of wonder; they work toward a universal insight through the particular; and they both embrace uncertainty. At their core is the great I don’t know. From mosquitoes to black holes, from mitochondria to a fetal bat, we’ll read poems that focus the microscope—and the telescope—on the many subjects of science. An especially wonderful aspect of this writing is immersing yourself in research—in the world of facts and discovery––all the while your subconscious is at work to make what Maria Popova calls “stories of science winged with poetry.”

Guest Poet: Arthur Sze

I want to get readers to… “read with one’s nerves,”
… where they aren’t just reading intellectually,
but they’re reading viscerally.
—Arthur Sze

Like an artist assembling a collage or a film editor splicing a montage, poets build tension, friction, surprise, and meaning through juxtaposition. By putting things side-by-side without explanation, we invite the reader into the poem to consider the relationship. As Susan Griffin says, “The meaning is allowed to become more nuanced and even open-ended.” These unexpected pairings can be of images, ideas, and events, as well as of syntax and voice. You’ll learn a variety of approaches to make evocative associations. Juxtaposition reflects the complexity of our lives.

Guest Poet: Nikky Finney

If you ain’t no place, you can’t go nowhere.
—Richard Hugo

From a trailer in Bakersfield to a seafood market in South Carolina, from a Broadway street fair to New Mexico’s high desert, from one’s homeland to a home in exile, we’ll read poems set on the coordinates of time and space. The location of a poem offers us vivid details and images as well as influencing the action that happens there. And descriptions of place can carry a lot of the emotional work of a poem. As Naomi Shihab Nye says, “place is the gravity of poetry.” We’ll study how poets use place to give life to a poem and I’ll offer practices to explore your own landscapes.

Guest Poet: Patricia Smith

If you’re going to write a persona poem it better be about you.
—Stanley Plumly

Writing a persona poem allows us to inhabit anyone. We can delve into what is sometimes called the umwelt, the world as it is experienced by another being. Or we can imagine the thoughts and feelings of an inanimate object. This intimate form makes it possible to talk about the self in ways we might not risk in our own voice. And the persona poem can also provide a means to give voice to those who haven’t been heard. We’ll hear poems that embody a wild array of voices from Demeter to a drag queen, from Hurricane Katrina to a mummy to a roly-poly bug to salt! All of which will inspire our own poems and enlarge how we think about ourselves and the world.

Guest Poet: Carolyn Forché

No ideas but in things.
—William Carlos Williams

Examining something closely, even an ordinary, everyday thing, has been a steadfast practice of poets. We’ll look at poems that turn their attention to the abundance of the physical world. They may move from specific objects into feelings and thoughts, but at their center is what Tony Hoagland calls thingitude—the fascinating stuff of the actual world. We’ll study poems that describe and respond to a wide range of objects––a pebble, a mother’s colander, a refrigerator from 1957, car keys, the last cigarette–and more! I’ll present strategies you can use to write poems that begin with a thing and open to reveal unexpected depths. As Dorianne Laux says, “There is so much to be mined from even the simplest objects if you’re willing to live with them awhile and listen to what they have to say.”