What happens if you write a poem without attention to line breaks? What is a poem if it comes in the form of paragraphs instead of stanzas? Is it verse or prose? Students in this class will learn about the rich history of the prose poem, a “genre with an oxymoron for a name.”

We’ll briefly touch on the foggy borderlands between flash fiction and prose poetry, then engage in close readings of prose poems by Arthur Rimbaud, Lu Xun, Rabindranath Tagore, Jose Hernandez Diaz, and Emily Berry.

Students will be given time to write and share their own work, and they will come away from the class with prompts and strategies for writing more prose poems.

This class is taught by a graduate student in the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.