ONLY POEMS PRIZE
$3600 Awarded
April 21
POET OF THE WEEK
PHILIP SCHAEFER
Philip Schaefer’s collection Bad Summon (University of Utah Press, 2017) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, while individual poems have won contests from The Puritan, Meridian, & Passages North. His work has been featured on Poem-A-Day, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in The Poetry Society of America. He runs a modern Mexican restaurant called The Camino in Missoula, MT.
The first time I smelled you felt like deleting the weather
channel app & walking shirtless into the rain & laying down
in the tall grass until I was the tall grass.
I want to reach a truth that skips the more logical responses of our minds. Cohen was on the nose. And in poetry we have a rare luxury: we are probably the most underappreciated and least comprehended art genre out there, so middle birds up. Talk to some blue god’s dachshund while huffing battery glue. Sneak into a resting hot air balloon. Tell your unborn daughter you want to throw a mattress on her. Mean it (but also don’t).
$50 Saturday, May 18, 12 PM EST via Zoom with Karan Kapoor
1st Workshop Sold Out
2nd Workshop — 15 spots left
Learn to write, revise, and publish your prose poems. In this workshop, we will go through the brief history of the prose poem and discuss successful prose poets like Robert Hass, Luke Kennard, Ray Gonzáles, C.D. Wright, Carolyn Forché, Richard Garcia, Lydia Davis, Russell Edson, Claudia Rankine, and Mary Ruefle. We will also close-read a couple of prose poems together. After that, we will engage in some generative exercises to develop our own prose poem during the workshop. There will be an opportunity for live instructor and peer feedback.
After the workshop, I am happy to provide another round of editorial feedback on your complete prose poem.