The Shape of Sound: Inventing Poetic Forms with Rachelle Toarmino
The Italians called the building blocks of poems stanzas, their word for rooms. The poet Charles Olson imagined the poem as an open field, a space where your breath makes all the moves. But whether we imagine poems as houses, fields, or universes, to get to the moving we need to feel out the space. Is it the size of a postage stamp, or does it seem to yearn outward forever? Does it have nooks, crannies, and hideaways, or is it something spare, cool, and illuminated, where no syllable can get away?
This workshop focuses on the forms of poems and the ways form sets expectations—and opens up new possibilities—for sound, shape, and ultimately, meaning. Our method will be both tactile and imaginative: How might a poem function if it were a shopping mall, a hand mirror, a basketball game, a cul-de-sac? We’ll look at contemporary innovations like Jericho Brown’s duplex, Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s marble run, and others; study how these forms look, move, and tick; and experiment with inventing forms of our own
- Youth Writing Workshops at the JBWC are FREE and aimed at young students aged 12–18.
- This workshop is hybrid—you can attend in-person or from home!
- ACCESSIBILITY NOTE: If you have any questions/issues accessing any of these opportunities, please let us know and we will work with you to make sure you can participate.
Date
- Thursday, November 16, 2023
- Expired!
Time
- 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm
Location
- 468 Washington Street, 2nd Floor, Buffalo, NY 14203
Other Locations
Featured Artist
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Rachelle ToarminoPoet & EssayistRachelle Toarmino is the author of the poetry collection That Ex and the chapbooks Comeback, Feel Royal, and Personal & Generic. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Electric Literature, Iterant, Literary Hub, Salt Hill Journal, The Slowdown, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in poetry at UMass Amherst, where she received an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is also the founding editor in chief of the literary journal Peach Mag, as well as the founder and lead instructor of Beauty School, a new independent poetry school. She was born and raised in Niagara Falls, New York and currently lives in Buffalo.
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