Formal Poetry: Writing with the Net Up with Lorna Blake

We will test Robert Frost’s dictum that writing without form is like playing tennis with the net down.  How dependent are we on form?  How do we write in form?  How do we then break form and make it our own?  How do we match form and content to create powerful, musical and compelling poems? We will, over the course of the week, through imitation and experiment, create our own formal poems.  This workshop is suitable for poets at all levels of experience.

Lorna Knowles Blake: BA, Trinity College, MBA New York University and MFA, Sarah Lawrence College. Her first collection, Permanent Address, won the 2007 Richard Snyder Memorial Prize (Ashland Poetry Press).  She has been a Walter E. Dakin Fellow and Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and was awarded a residency from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  Poems, essays and reviews have recently appeared or are forthcoming in the Hudson Review, Cortland Review, Literary Imagination and other journals.   Ms. Blake has taught creative writing at the 92nd Street Y, The Walker Percy Writing Institute in New Orleans, The Ladies Library in Brewster and has been a supplemental faculty member of the Sarah Lawrence College Summer Writing Program.  She has recently completed a second collection of poems. She lives in New Orleans and Cape Cod.