Eight Wednesdays, October 2 through November 20, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

The growing field of recent lyric prose has made a home for writing in which sustained inquiry strengthens and builds, or narrows, or multiplies, rather than chasing an answer down or contriving resolution. In this active writing workshop for poets and prose writers, we will train our attention on works by writers who have found new form for poetic inquiry; we will examine their example, isolate some techniques, take permission, and generate our own new work for development and weekly group critique. Aligned with the Poetry Center’s “Hybrid Writing” reading series scheduled this fall, we will study and experiment with prose that borrows from the practice of poetry: seriality, constraint, repetition and variation, inference, artifice, rhetoric and lyric speech (the soliloquy quality of speech meant to be overheard), assemblage and puzzle, and recursion. Special guests will visit, and readings may include work by Maggie Nelson, Thalia Field, Jenny Boully, Virginia Woolf, Guy Davenport, David Antin, Anne Carson, Aaron Kunin, and Brandon Brown.