Musicality of Language: Poetry Across Genres

Learn new approaches and enhance your skills for writing poetry.

Whether a print culture poet, spoken word/performance poet or rapper/emcee, a versatile command of language is the most important element of your craft. During this four-week workshop, you will explore a variety of modes and exercises to help enhance your tool kits in writing, revision, and new approaches. Great ideas often emanate from unusual sources, from pop culture to old encyclopedias. We will explore unorthodox, as well as traditional, research methods to disrupt and challenge your normal, in an effort to inspire fresh ideas. We will also explore the balance of message and craft, and when & how & why to disrupt that balance. Athletes stretch. Writers also must stretch. If writers don't continuously challenge themselves, whether it's a thematic challenge or a craft challenge, we write the same poem repeatedly.

"Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home."

-Gwendolyn Brooks

Instructor: Quraysh Ali Lansana earned his MFA from NYU. He is the author of the poetry collections The Skin of Dreams: New and Collected Poems 1995-2018 (2019), The Walmart Republic (2014); mystic turf (2012), They Shall Run: Harriet Tubman Poems (2004), Southside Rain (2000), and; his chapbooks include reluctant minivan (2014), bloodsoil (sooner red) (2009), Greatest Hits: 1995-2005 (2006), and cockroach children: corner poems and street psalms (1995). He has also written three children's books, including A Gift from Greensboro (Penny Candy Books, 2016) and The Big World (1999). Quraysh is the editor of eight anthologies and is the last student of Miss Gwendolyn Brooks. He serves on the Advisory Committee for the Center for Poets and Writers at OSU-Tulsa, is a Fellow with the Tulsa Artist Fellowship and a member of Tri-City Collective.