Event

How to Write Like I Do with Gary Copeland Lilley

Poems represent the blurring of real experience with those that are completely created. Actual occurrences are the skeletons of poems but a pulse, a layered muscularity, and the presence of fluids, the sparks of the imagined, if you will, give poems the power to walk us down the street into the discovery within situations that we personally have not seen. Too often we are told to write what we know, facts, instead of what we can believe, truths. This workshop will explore tactile and concrete details, syntax and diction, as well as other tools to use in making your poems come alive. It is expected that draft poems will be created daily. This workshop is appropriate for beginning and experienced poets.

Bio: Gary Lilley is the author of four books: Black Poem, Alpha Zulu, The Reprehensibles, and The Subsequent Blues. Lilley has been a poet-in-residence at WritersCorps, Young Chicago Authors, and The Poetry Center of Chicago, and received the DC Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. He currently lives in Port Townsend.