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The Shape of Attention: Exploring Form in Poetry and Prose

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

On Saturday, August 15, from 3–5 PM ET, I’ll be teaching a virtual workshop with The Notebooks Collective called The Shape of Attention: Exploring Form in Poetry and Prose.

This workshop grows out of a question I keep returning to in my own writing and teaching: What happens when we change the shape of a piece?

Sometimes, a draft stalls because of the shape we have asked the subject to live inside. A memory may not want to become a straight narrative. An image may need the pressure of a list. A question may need to remain a question. A fragment may be asking for other fragments beside it. A block of prose may create a kind of momentum that line breaks would interrupt; a poem’s white space may allow silence to do some of the thinking.

In this two-hour generative workshop, we’ll explore form as a practical and imaginative tool for writers of poetry, prose, and hybrid work. Rather than treating form as a rule to obey or a test of mastery, we’ll approach it as a way to direct attention, create pressure, interrupt habit, and invite surprise.

We’ll think together about four possible ways form works:

Form as container: What pressure does this shape create?
Form as movement: How does this shape move the mind from one line, sentence, section, image, or thought to the next?
Form as permission: What does this shape allow me to say that I might not otherwise say?
Form as interruption: What habit does this shape disrupt?

Participants will move through a series of low-pressure writing exercises designed to generate new material and offer fresh ways into existing drafts. We’ll work with forms such as lists, address, questions, fragments, blocks of prose, braids, and sequences, asking: “What does this form make possible?”

Writers are invited to bring a short draft, fragment, image, object, or memory they’d like to write from, though no prior preparation is required. Something to write with or on is enough.

This workshop is open to poets, prose writers, hybrid writers, and anyone curious about how structure can help us think, feel, remember, and discover.

Registration is available through The Notebooks Collective.

Two Poetry Notes: Rotura and Summer, Still

José Angel Araguz 1 Comment

I have two pieces of poetry news to share, both involving poems finding their way back into the world.

First, my collection Rotura is included in Black Lawrence Press’s Sealey Challenge sale. Thirty-one full-length poetry collections are currently available for $12 each through the Black Lawrence Press sale page.

Published in 2022, Rotura moves through questions of family, longing, language, borders, and the different forms rupture can take within a life. For anyone curious about the book, three poems from the collection (“Certain Rivers,” “Conditioning (City Study),” and “Four Dirges”) can be read together at Poetry Is Currency.

I’m also glad to share the publication of Summer, Still, a new anthology from Lily Poetry Review featuring poetry and prose by faculty and alumni of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program. The anthology celebrates the program’s twentieth anniversary and the community of writers that has gathered around it over the years.

My poem “Night Matter” is included in the anthology. The poem considers writing as an act of persistence: what it means to continue making words when light is scarce and the night around us feels both material and immense. It first appeared as part of my January 2018 feature at A Dozen Nothing, where you can read “Night Matter” online.

There is something meaningful to me about these two announcements arriving together. One points back toward a collection and the poems gathered within it; the other allows an earlier poem to enter a new gathering, this time alongside the work of writers connected through Solstice.

I’m grateful for both occasions, for the continued life of these poems, and for anyone who spends time with them.

Happy reading!

José