Literary Friday - Dennis Haskell - Poetry Punctuation

Literary Friday OOTA members only event - $10 payable on the day. June is a poetry workshop facilitated by Dennis Haskell who has asked attendees to bring along one of their own poems printed out - no longer than one page - to work on.

"Poetry has a metaphysical, or spiritual, dimension that is unique to it; it is also the most technically complex form of any writing. What is perhaps surprising – and probably only practitioners are aware of it – is that the two elements are closely related. The most fundamental element of poetic technique is one that is rarely discussed and often completely overlooked: punctuation! Changes in punctuation can create profound differences in the way a poem is perceived, as the editors of Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson and others could tell you. I think that the most important elements of poetic punctuation are line breaks and stanza breaks but an age of free verse and more recently of prose poetry has generated a great deal of uncertainty about them.

In the workshop we will focus on this apparently mechanical but actually more profound aspect of poetic craft. I would like you to bring along one of your poems –no more than a page long – typed up as prose; we will use this in the writing part of the day.(And I hope you’ve noticed that I’ve used lots of different punctuation in this blurb!)

Dennis Haskell"

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