Brooklyn Poets Craft Lab: On Form: “Not Shapes, but Forces”

Register by May 19th to take advantage of our earlybird discount. Members take $40 off—use your members-only code. Non-members take $25 off—use code EARLYBIRD at checkout.

If rage had a shape, what would it be? How about longing? Lust? Grief? Let’s ask that again. If rage had a motion, what would it be? In her essay “The Rejection of Closure,” Lyn Hejinian writes, “Writing’s forms are not merely shapes but forces; formal questions are about dynamics—they ask how, where, and why the writing moves, what are the types, directions, number, and velocities of a work’s motion.” While many contemporary poets have shifted away from the notion that our poems should take traditional structures, the best poets remain as meticulous in their formal choices as they are in their word choices.

How clearly can you articulate the formal “dynamics” of your poems? How precisely can you define the relationship between the words in your poems and the physical bodies that hold them and move them? How intentional are your couplets? Your formal experiments? Is your commitment to a received form necessary or is the poem a sestina because someone made you write a sestina? What about the role of power—of colonialism—in our formal choices? Who gets to write in received forms and who gets to deform them? Prepare to get extremely geeky and think deeply about how to push your formal imagination until your poems tell you how they want to move.

All participants will have access to a cloud recording of the craft lab for one month afterward.

To request financial aid for this craft lab, please fill out the request form on our website. 

About the teacher

Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of Bianca (Four Way Books, 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014). Her poems and essays have appeared in publications such as Time, the Nation, Poetry, Ploughshares, Waxwing and the Best of the Net anthology. The recipient of Poetry’s Bess Hokin Prize as well as awards and fellowships from Poets & Writers, Kundiman and elsewhere, Eugenia received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and serves as a poetry editor at Adroit and as the Valentines editor at Honey Literary.

Closed captions for the event will be available via Zoom. To request additional accommodations or more information, please contact us at bkp@brooklynpoets.org. Note that by attending you agree to abide by our code of conduct below.

Brooklyn Poets Code of Conduct

Brooklyn Poets will not tolerate any instances of discrimination, harassment or abuse in conjunction with any of our programs. Respect and consideration for others, both within and outside our programs, are core values to be upheld by all participants. Discrimination against and/or harassment of community members on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, national origin, religion, age, marital status, veteran status or any other factor is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. Program participants are expected to adhere to all federal, state and local laws and regulations. Should a board or staff member, independent contractor, volunteer or program participant be found to violate any aspect of the organization’s code of conduct, Brooklyn Poets reserves the right to dismiss them from the program. Consequences may include, but not be limited to, dismissal from the current activity, suspension, ineligibility for all future activities, and/or loss of payment or fees. If you have any issues to report, please do not hesitate to contact anyone on our Conduct Committee and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

Board Vice President Jessica Greenbaum: jessicaruthgreenbaum@gmail.com
Deputy Director r kay: kay@brooklynpoets.org
Executive Director & Board Treasurer Jason Koo: koo@brooklynpoets.org
Board Director Miller Oberman: miller.oberman@gmail.com