V113.
Reclaiming Meter: Strategies for Contemporary Poem-Making
Wednesday, March 8, 2023
12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
In a poetic context where most work is not overtly metrical, metrical poems surprise. They can make room for new modes of being and saying, a potential realized by poets from Millay to Brooks to Patricia Smith. Each panelist will consider a metrical poem that has shaped their poetic practice—including work in noniambic meters—and will share a prompt inspired by the poem. We’ll explore meter, employed directly and as it informs free verse, as a radical, generative force in contemporary poetry.
This event has been prerecorded, and will be available to watch on-demand online from March 8, 2023 to April 8, 2023.
Participants
Sophia Stid is a poet from California. She is the Ecotone Postgraduate Fellow at UNC Wilmington, where she teaches creative writing and serves as the associate editor of Ecotone. Her chapbook Whistler's Mother was published by Bull City Press in 2021.
Chad Abushanab is the author of The Last Visit, winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. His poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Best New Poets, Southern Poetry Review, Ecotone, and others. He is an assistant professor of English at Bemidji State University in Minnesota.
Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St Brigid Press. The recipient of an NC Arts Council Fellowship in literature, she is the editor of Ecotone and an editor of Lookout Books, and teaches at UNC Wilmington.
Jenna Le, MD, is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora. Her poetry, fiction, essays, criticism, and translations appear in AGNI Online, Bellevue Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.
Alexis Sears is the author of Out of Order, winner of the 2021 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. She received her bachelor of arts degree from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and her MFA in poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been widely published in literary journals.
