2 Sessions: Saturday + Sunday, March 12 +13
Noon-2:00pm ET

In ways we may not at first perceive, our sentences are vehicles for ascribing agency to what matters most to us. Ellen Bryant Voigt in The Art of Syntax calls the power-holding unit in a sentence the fundament. In this class, we’ll consider all the interesting choices we get to make when crafting long sentences in poems and the effects those choices have on our readers. We’ll look at sentences that create sensations of accumulation as they branch, disorientation as they leap, and suspense via delay. To prepare, you’ll read an excerpt from Voigt’s book, as well as an essay by Virginia Tufte from Artful Sentences, and we’ll look at a selection of poems. No particular grammatical background or confidence is required to come along for this adventure. We’ll talk about grammar playfully and subversively as poets do, building a vocabulary for what we observe together.

Register here for this two-part Zoom seminar through The Shipman Agency Work Room.