Death Rattle at Shared Stories Books 

✩°Instructor: D Kopec

“informed form” is a workshop class that aims to prepare students to craft poetry structured around a self-invented form. This workshop will ask students to come with a simple, written idea for a poem– a handful of sentences or even a small list of images is ideal for this class! We’ll begin by looking at some examples of intentional uses of particular forms in poetry: the sonnet, sestina, and the cento. After this, we’ll look at a few poems that are using a form to structure themselves, but are definitely not using any established, familiar, or classic form. Line breaks, meter, repetition, and other points of structure will be broken down, so each form can be basically and mechanically understood. From there, we’ll discuss as a group what these constraints do for the pieces on a mechanical, emotional, and contextual level. We’ll examine how the marriage of form and content come together to create an overall impression of a poem, and if our examples are doing this successfully. In the last chunk of the workshop, we will have some generation time with the ideas each student brought with them to the workshop, wherein each participant is encouraged to proceed writing their ideas with some formal constraints in mind. Finally, we’ll engage in a short, round table discussion on next steps for our students’ poems. Anyone who’d like to share aloud may do so, time permitting.


✩°Limit 15 slots

Materials required: 
✩°A simple, low stakes collection of ideas for a poem. 
✩°A notebook and pen, laptop computer, or other dependable way to write.

May 22 - 7pm-9pm 
All Ages - $7 Donation for supplies & instructor 
@sharedstoriesbooks
106 S Caldwell on Indian Creek Plaza, Caldwell