POET CAMP Registration
Registration
Growing Potatoes in the Dark: Structure & Surprise in Narrative Poems
with Rick Barot
Sunday, August 17, 5 p.m. – 8 p.m.
Eastern Time
$50 Full / $25 Scholarship
*Live on Google Meet. This workshop will be recorded.
Storytelling is one of the deepest of human urges. It is why we write, and why we have literature and art. For a reader, reading a poem is a transformative experience in two ways: the reader apprehends the what of the poem (its content, its story) and inhabits the how of the poem (its structure, its form). In this three-hour craft immersion, we’ll examine how storytelling happens in a number of exemplary poems—how story and structure come into gorgeous dynamic. We will pay especially close attention to structure, what it is, and how it can be flexibly used in poems. Additionally, we’ll look at surprise and the way it intensifies a reader’s sense of illumination. Our discussion will be in service, of course, to your own poems and the strategies of craft you might bring to them.
Sarah note: If the scholarship rate would enable you to join us, please use that link. No questions asked! Please pay what you’re able. <3
Rick Barot is the author of Moving the Bones. He was born in the Philippines, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and attended Wesleyan University and The Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. His previous books are The Darker Fall, which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize; Want, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize; and Chord, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and received the 2016 UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. His fourth book of poems The Galleons was published by Milkweed Editions in 2020. It was listed on the top ten poetry books for 2020 by the New York Public Library, was a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Awards, and was on the longlist for the National Book Award. Barot has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Poetry. In 2020, Barot received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He teaches at Pacific Lutheran University and lives in Tacoma, Washington. Find out more at rickbarot.com.
Growing Potatoes - Full Rate $50
Growing Potatoes - Scholarship Rate $25
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