Saturday, December 5, 2026, 8:00am – 10:00am
Meeting will take place in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room, Room 205; limit 12 students. General registration for Fall 2026 Classes & Workshops will open on Tuesday, August 25th at 10:00am.
“Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels,” explained Peter Johnson. A favorite of the French symbolists and contemporary poets alike, the prose poem is an enigmatic, hybrid creature that wields the techniques of poetry but foregoes its line breaks. The poet James Tate went as far as to suggest that its paragraphs could trick the reader "into glimpsing a little sliver of eternity." In the first half, we will read and study examples by Natalie Diaz, José Olivarez, Aracelis Girmay, and Robin Coste Lewis. In the second, we will turn to a writing exercise that will help us generate and share our own prose poems.