The Hundred-Line Poem
Instructor: Harriet Levin
Please Note: This is a four-week workshop
Virtual workshop meetings via Zoom
Dates: August 5, 12, 19, and 26 (Tuesdays)
Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern
Standard Price: $100
Economic Hardship: $75
Please note: This workshop is being rescheduled. Most likely for Winter 2025/26
Workshop Description:
Jump to the next level in your writing! Often we stop ourselves from exploring our material before we even confront it. Some of us may hold misconceptions about resolutions and endings or how to lean into narrative leaps. Together, we will practice slowing down our pace, spreading out, sustaining our concentration as we carpet our poems to fill the space of an entire room. We’ll read examples of hundred-line poems, including poem cycles, sequences, centos, and narratives, written by poets such as Walt Whitman, Octavio Paz, Larry Levis, Frank O’Hara, Diane Suess, Marilyn Chin, Martha Silano, Terrance Hayes, Peter Gizzi, Erin Murphy, and Jorie Graham. We will try out techniques such as accordion-style writing, parallel constructions, chiasmus, and repetition in the work of the poems we’ve discussed. The takeaway is your creation of a hundred-line draft. Those who are willing will have the opportunity to share these drafts in a nurturing environment.
About The Workshop Instructor:
Prize winning poet and writer Harriet Levin is the author of three poetry collections, The Christmas Show (Beacon Press, 1997), Girl in Cap and Gown (Mammoth Books, 2010), and My Oceanography (CavanKerry, 2018). Eavan Boland selected her debut book for the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. She is also the winner of The Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a PEW Fellowship in the Arts Discipline Award, The Grolier’s Ellen LaForge Memorial Poetry Prize and Nimrod International’s Pablo Neruda Award. Her writing has appeared widely in journals such as The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Narrative Magazine, Ploughshares, The Forward, Prairie Schooner, The Smart Set, The Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly Review, Plume, ONE ART, and The Kenyon Review. She’s held poetry residencies at Yaddo, The Virginia Center for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. Levin is also the author of a novel, How Fast Can You Run, a novel based on the life of “Lost Boy” of Sudan Michael Majok Kuch (Harvard Square Editions, 2016), which came out of a project she founded with her students at Drexel University to reunite Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan with their mothers living abroad. How Fast Can You Run was excerpted in The Kenyon Review and profiled on NPR. Charter for Compassion chose How Fast Can You Run for its 2016 Global Read. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and has taught creative writing in both the undergraduate and MFA Program at Drexel University. In collaboration with PEN Haiti, she led a Drexel study abroad creative writing intensive to Port-au-Prince, from 2013-2018 for which the Philadelphia Haitian Coalition honored her with a Haiti Cultural Ambassador Award.