Paragraphics?: The prose poem, lyric essay and hybridity

Professional Development Workshop With Heather Taylor-Johnson

‘If it’s a poem, no matter what form it is, it’s a poem. If it’s not a poem, no matter what form it is, it’s not a poem.’ That’s what I heard at a poetry conference in Canberra, 2022, the Iranian Australian poet Marjon Mossammaparast quoting the Chinese poet Ai Qing. It spoke deeply to me, as a poet who works in prose and a prose writer who works in poetry, and as a writer who constantly wants not to erase the labels, but to smash them together.

In this workshop, let’s explore the hybrid, those prose poems that can be lyric essay and those lyric essays that can be prose poems. Let’s get rid of binaries – we’re so beyond those. And let’s forget the word ‘hybrid’, because it suggests an in-between, and we want to write something that knows exactly what it is.

This workshop is for the open-minded, those excited about exploration and those who’ve got something to say and are looking for a cool way to say it.

 

**For this workshop, please bring in an old poem or work of prose that’s NOT SUCCEEDING – we’re going to play around with it and see if we can shape it into something effective.

Heather Taylor-Johnson lives and writes on Kaurna land near Port Adelaide. Her third novel Little Bit is a work of autofiction. Before that, Jean Harley was Here was shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Fiction. Her essays on art and illness have won the Island Nonfiction Prize and been shortlisted for ABR’s Calibre Prize. Her seventh book of poems is I Lost Someone Then Found Them In My Body. She is the editor of Shaping the Fractured Self: Poetry of Chronic Illness and Pain, read widely in disability circles. She is an Adjunct Research Fellow at the J M Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice.