Oregon State Poetry Association

Workshop Information

"The Odd Ode" with Matthew Dickman
We will be looking at odes written on subjects that are not normally celebrated and also odes that break away from the norm. We will also be writing our own odd odes and sharing them in class. This will be a celebration so bring your party hats!

"Consider the Fragment" with Quinton Hallett
When our lives are fragmented and the many hats poets wear combine with the millions of pieces of information received daily, wouldn’t it be helpful to mine this chaos in our work? In admiring a musical composition or mosaic, is it not the small phrases or tesserae which grab our attention? Quinton Hallett will lead a workshop in which we welcome the fragment, consider the energy embodied in these small phrases and investigate ways to invigorate work which may have been stalled. This workshop will draw from poets such as Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Carolyn Forché, and Anne Carson, and use multiple sources such as Haibun, Cento, Wave Waltz, jazz, collage, mosaic, fractals, and the “sovereignty of the accidental.’”(Forché)  Participants will then break into ‘strands’ led by a Eugene poet to write, incorporating the happy dichotomy between control and letting loose the fragments.

For pre- workshop reading, try Terry Tempest Williams’s
“Finding Beauty in a Broken World,” Pantheon, 2008
and American Hybrid, A Norton Anthology of New Poetry edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John,

All conference attendees will participate in both workshops. You will be assigned a workshop when you check in at the registration table.