“Picnic, Lightning”: Concision, Compression, & Brevity in the Very Short Poem with Patrick Donnelly via Zoom

We’ll focus on the Very Short Poem, the highly pressurized lyric that casts off a resonance far bigger than its real estate. We’re going to explore how a poem can become more focused and intense with strategies of inference, implication, subordination, and exclusion. We’ll also explore the different kinds of projects the short poem can take on—just because a poem is short doesn’t mean it shares the same kind of project as another short poem. Our time together will include a generative exercise—please join us to add the VSP to your poetic toolbox!

Patrick Donnelly is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Little-Known Operas (Four Way Books, 2019). About Donnelly, Gregory Orr wrote “everything he writes is suffused with tenderness and intelligence, lucidity and courage.” Donnelly is director of the Poetry Seminar at The Frost Place, Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, NH, now a center for poetry and the arts. Former poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, Slate, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and many other journals. Donnelly’s translations with Stephen D. Miller of classical Japanese poetry were awarded the 2015-2016 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Donnelly’s other awards include a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program Award, an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and an Amy Clampitt Residency Award.