T150.
The Pocket Epic: Poets Writing at Length
Thursday, March 9, 2023
10:35 am to 11:50 am
In a form characterized by compression, what does it mean to write at length? Can such works cleave to standards of precision and concision as they extend beyond the standard one-pager? What kinds of world-building, expansiveness of thought, or complexity of experience might be achieved in multipage or even book-length poems? Panelists will read briefly from their work, discuss both formal and free-verse approaches to writing long poems, and offer strategies for generating and sustaining them.
Participants
Melissa Crowe is the author of the poetry collection Dear Terror, Dear Splendor (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). She's coordinator of the MFA program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she teaches poetry and publishing.
Meg Day is the 2015–2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level. Day is an assistant professor of english and creative writing in the MFA program at NC State.
Paisley Rekdal is the author, most recently, of Appropriate: A Provocation and Nightingale. A Guggenheim fellow and Utah's Poet Laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah, where she edits the web archive project Mapping Literary Utah.
Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, essayist, and scholar, and the author of the poetry collection Arrow. Following three years as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan, she is now assistant professor of English and creative writing at North Carolina State University.
