Saturday, September 7 from 10am-4pm
There will be an hour lunch break mid-way through the workshop (lunch is not provided).
Early Bird pricing through August 15
Regular price effective August 16
Please have 1-2 poems prepared to bring to the workshop.
Space is LIMITED to ensure an intimate experience. We recommend signing up EARLY!
Refund and health policies can be found here.
Writing a poem, as any poet knows, is an exacting task, demanding many hours or work. Once it’s on the page, the poet faces an even more onerous task of reading the poem.
How does one get the words on the page to speak to an audience? How does one get a poem to come alive and touch the hearts of the audience?
In this workshop, Bruce Spang (former Poet Laureate of Portland) will work with a small group of poets to show them how to make the words come alive in a reading.
Join us to learn how to prepare a text so that, when you are reading a poem, you have visual cues on the page to prompt you to pause, to increase or decrease your pace, to shift the tone of your voice, to emphasize certain words or phrases, and to explore, and then deliver the emotional arc of a poem.
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The session will be divided into two parts.
The first section will be learning how to prep a poem with cues about pacing a poem, to use the instrument of the voice, to develop confidence in using the wide range of vocal pitches that can express a wide range of emotions, to incorporate both facial and bodily gestures to incarnate emotionally what is happening in the poem, and to engage the audience with eye contact.
In the second section, Bruce will coach each poet individually in how to make their poem, word by word, line by line, come alive. He will prompt each poet to use some of the techniques that were presented in the first section. By the end of the session, each poet will have rehearsed and performed one poem so that it does come alive for the audience.Poets will be asked to share their work (1-2 poems) with the instructor in advance of the workshop, as well as bringing two printed out copies of the poetry they are choosing to workshop.
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Bruce Spang, former Poet Laureate of Portland, is the author of two novels, The Deception of the Thrush and Those Close Beside Me. His most recent collection of poems, All You’ll Derive: A Caregiver’s Journey, was recently published. He’s also published four other books of poems, including To the Promised Land Grocery and Boy at the Screen Door (Moon Pie Press) along with several anthologies and several chapbooks. He wrote the book for a Musical Charlie, which is about the death of Charlie Howard who was murder in 1984 by three teens in Bangor, Maine. He is the poetry and fiction editor of the Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. His poems have been published in Connecticut River Review, Puckerbrush Review, Red Rover Magazine, Great Smokies Review, Kalopsia Literary Journal, Café Review and other journals across the United States. He teaches courses in fiction and poetry at Great Smokies Writing Program at University of North Carolina in Asheville and lives in Candler, NC with his husband Myles Rightmire and their five dogs, five fish, and thirty birds.
More at : brucepspang.wordpress.com