Poetry for Improvisers

Are you a graduate of the Improv Shop searching for a new medium to express yourself? Do you have a brand new or unwavering interest in poetry writing? You’re in luck! The tenets of St. Louis style improv lend themselves naturally to both reading and writing poetry. Both forms emphasize emotional point of view, patterning, and the desire to explore our interiorities (on stage, or on the page) in the service of finding out what it feels like to be a human being, and what it may have felt like for someone else.

In this eight-week introductory poetry-writing crash course, you will learn about the basic anatomy of poems (image, metaphor, etc.), gain confidence in analyzing poems, and through exercises and discussion, connect their mechanics to improvisatory principles you already know. Even if you’ve never written a poem before, you have already been trained using the framework of improv to read and write poetry!

To that end…read and write, you will! This workshop will have weekly reading and writing homework, in which students will annotate assigned poems in preparation for discussion, as well as send drafts of their own poems via group email chain. Since the work we do as improvisers is inherently communal, you will be asked to read (closely) the work of your peers, and offer suggestions and appreciations for their work, as they will yours.

By the end of this workshop, you will gain familiarity with reading and writing poetry, have written and workshopped poems of your own, learned writing techniques to take to your scene-work, and leave with a short (printed) anthology of poems written by you and your classmates—you will also feel empowered to continue reading and writing poetry, while making new friends to share them with!

Marc-Anthony Valle