A Poem-Stretcher Intensive:
Making Poems Go Wider and Deeper
A Three-Hour Webinar with Fleda Brown
You’ve written some pretty good poems. But lots of times, they feel just “pretty good.” You read some of the poems you most admire and you see how deep they go, how they expand outward in ways you wouldn’t have ever dreamed of. How do they do that?
In this workshop, we’ll first look closely at some published poems that stretch amazingly wide. We can use them as models. Then we’ll start from scratch. We’ll write a new poem. Using a beloved, neutral, or hated object to concentrate on (you supply your own object) we’re going to move step by step outward and inward, expanding our sense of what our poems can do.
If you’ve been writing poems for a while and are looking for some ways to jump out of your comfortable groove, join us for this session. But also, don’t hesitate to sign up if you’re fairly new to writing poems. This method can add to your repertoire.
The method I’m going to show you has worked for me and others many times. We’ll take it little by little. We’ll make a new poem from the ground up, starting with a kernel and launching out into space, and down into the earth. I think you’ll surprise yourself.
YOUR REGISTRATION BONUS
Upon registration, every U.S. participant will also receive a free copy of Freda's book, "Flying through a Hole in the Storm," just published by
Ohio University Press:
“[This is] a hybrid book, a combination of poetry and prose. It proves that at high levels of composition there is little distinction between the two. A superb accomplishment.”
Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and distinguished professor emeritus of creative writing at Stockton University
“It is easy to forget that only the rarest of people have something interesting to say about themselves. But Fleda Brown proves a mesmerizing exception—anything she cares to share is manna for our deepest needs.”
Foreword Reviews
“Fleda Brown has such a wide ranging intelligence, such a large and quirky variety of subjects, and such facility with language that you come away from her poems amazed at the emotional impact under the entertaining and colloquial surfaces.”
Linda Pastan
“Cast in an impressive variety of forms, Brown manages her signature, magical metamorphoses, poetry skying at its best, yet, somehow, never leaving the ground it rises from.”
Dabney Stuart
Fleda Brown has won the Felix Pollak Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award, and she has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she taught for twenty-seven years. She was poet laureate of Delaware 2001–7. She now lives with her husband, Jerry Beasley, in Traverse City, Michigan.