Pumping Irony Poetry Workshop by Stephen Brockwell
at Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeebar

Stephen Brockwell will host an intensive 8 week poetry workshop at the Collected Works Bookstore on Wellington Avenue near Holland. The Wednesday evening workshops will start September 26 and run until November 28 with a break for the Ottawa International Writers Festival. The two-hour sessions will involve close readings of poets from antiquity to the present, exploring ideas of line, form, constraint and voice. Each workshop will start with a discussion of work from the reading list and continue with readings and discussions of student work. Attendees will practice their chops on forms as diverse as the epigram, sonnet, ode, prose poem and, for lack of a better word, the contemporary poem-of-constraint. We will work collectively to think about and articulate our particular poetics. The group will edit and produce an anthology of their best original work from the workshop. Optional attendance at occasional pub gatherings will be rewarded with special prizes. The $200 fee will include the purchase of a selection of books from Collected Works.

The reading list will include work by
Homer
Sappho
Horace
Francois Villion
William Shakespeare
Ben Jonson
Sir Philip Sidney
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz
Francisco de Quevedo
Alexander Pope
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (poetry and criticism)
John Keats
Charles Baudelaire
Wallace Stevens
Marianne Moore
Fernando Pessoa
A. M. Klein
W. H. Auden
Philip Larkin
Robert Lowell
Al Purdy
Irving Layton
Margaret Avison
A. R. Ammons
Mark Strand
b.p. Nichol
Robert Kroetsch
Paul Marie Lapointe
Peter van Toorn
Daphne Marlatt
Anne Carson
Robyn Sarah
Christopher Dewdney
Erin Moure
George Elliot Clarke

For more information, contact Stephen Brockwell (sbrockwell@yahoo.com or 613 3214177).

Stephen Brockwell is the author of The Wire in Fences (Toronto: Balmuir, 1988), Cometology (Toronto: ECW Press, 2001), Fruitfly Geographic (Toronto: ECW Press, 2004), winner of the Archibald Lampman Award, and The Real Made Up (Toronto: ECW Press, 2007). His work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies since theearly 1980s. Brockwell has read in the U.S., England and Ireland. He has been an editor of Short Poems, Rubicon, The Rideau Review, and currently edits http://www.poetics.ca with rob mclennan. Brockwell lives within walking distance of the Collected Works bookstore.