Poetry 101: Line Breaks

We’ve moved online! All workshops will be conducted through Zoom, an interactive platform that allows you to participate in exercises and contribute to group conversation in your workshops. You’ll receive an email with a Zoom link to your workshop 5pm the day before the workshop.

Member Price: $30
Deadline to Register: October 29, 5 pm
Instructor: Anastasia Nikolis

Poetry is recognizable because of its line breaks. Line breaks give poetry its hallmark appearance on the page by turning blocks of text into short, neat lines. But line breaks aren’t made by just randomly hitting the return key on your keyboard. When used well, line breaks can expand the logic of the preceding line or subvert the meaning of a sentence in order to create tension and drama. In this workshop, we will look at an array of poems in class and refer to James Longenbach’s The Art of the Poetic Line to see how line breaks work and why line breaks are such a special tool in the poet’s toolbox.

Anastasia Nikolis is a scholar, writer, and teacher. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Rochester, where she focused on 20th-21st century American poetry. She currently is the Poetry Editor for the literary translation press, Open Letter Books, and teaches courses in writing, literature, and gender studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology and at St. John Fisher College. For more information, find her online at www.anastasianikolis.com and on Twitter @nikolisanastasi.