Poetry of Abundance: Exploring the Contemporary Long Poem (ZOOM) [Marcelo Hernandez Castillo]

Contemporary poets have implored us to trust our patience with length in an age of bite-sized headlines. In this workshop, we will explore how the nuances, forms, and structures of long poems as meditations and investigations by writers such as Larry Levis, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Robert Hayden, Anne Carson, John Murillo, and C.D. Wright, among others, sustain our attention in an ebb and flow of information, storytelling, and lyric imagery. We will grapple with ideas of economy, memory, and narrative arcs as we comb through the major tenets of the contemporary poem of length. This is a flexible workshop in which students will generate new material as well as offer previously written material for critique.