At the Net: A Talk on Form

Robert Frost famously compared writing free verse to "play[ing] tennis with the net down"; Ezra Pound, quoting T.S. Eliot, said "No verse is free for the man trying to do a good job." Poet Laura Mullen offers an informal talk on what poet George Oppen called "the achievements of form," old and new. Mullen (author of The Surface, The Tales of Horror, and After I Was Dead) will read poems and discuss the formal idea as creative impetus and shaping force. Known for her formal abilities and inventions, Mullen will answer questions about how we, as writers, find our forms, and how our forms find us. From the problems and possibilities of traditional form, through genre as outline, to the associative stimulus of other disciplines and that glimpse of the uncanny wilderness within us opened by chance procedures, Mullen will give examples from her work and suggestions for ways to proceed, via serious play, with your own.