Robert Hass said that when a poem is alive in its sound, the line is a proposal about listening. In this generative workshop, we will play with the musicality of the line from a single syllable onward. How can we manipulate and incorporate silence into our lines? We’ll take a look at poems from Lucille Clifton, Kim Addonizio, William Carlos Williams, C.D. Wright, Sylvia Plath, and others to feel out how music informs their lines. Participants will leave this workshop with multiple drafts of poems of varying musical style.
Paige Quiñones is a PhD student in poetry at the University of Houston, where she is the Managing Editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Previously a fellow with the Center for Mexican American Studies at UH, she received her MFA in poetry from the Ohio State University. Her work has twice been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2019 Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. Her book The Best Prey was selected by Tiana Clark for Pleides Press as the winner of the 2020 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, and will be published in 2021.