Instructor: Zamora | Tu/Th 02:00 PM – 03:20 PM
Storytelling is at the heart of our humanity. Prose poetry and flash remind us storytelling and poetry are simultaneous acts, not opposing forces. This workshop looks deeply at the genre-bending forms of prose poetry and flash prose (prose meaning both fiction and nonfiction). Prose poetry, flash fiction, and flash memoir/essayette all constellate around brevity and use all the tools within the three genres to create bursts of worlds. We’ll discuss the inherent resistant nature in flash/prose poetry—as a place where our language, our imagination, our experience, our lyric, and our human complexities permeate each other. Students will learn techniques of concision, inference, imagery, scene, setting, lyric, prosody, fragmentation, punctuation innovation, characterization, form, narrative, juxtaposition, voice, details, metaphor, story, and… and…and…in an economical space. The language in flash must be the fire but also the burn—from first word to last word—unrelenting. In flash and prose poetry, sparseness reigns. Students will intensely read and discuss texts and authors writing in contemporary prose poetry and flash, create their own unique pieces of flash/prose poetry throughout the semester, workshop pieces within a community focused on the power and precision of flash, and revise toward a final creative portfolio.