Parisian Phoenix Publishing

We held our last Writers Workshop at Easton Area Public Library focusing on poetry with Nancy Scott and Darrell Parry. Nancy and Darrell both read from their work and offered tips and prompts on how to incorporate poetry into any writing routine.

Nancy mentioned unorthodox opportunities for publication and how the same event/inspiration can be transformed into poetry or prose (or prose poetry) based on the submission requirements (or audience) for the market. This piece in Disability Studies Quarterly, an academic journal, began life as a poem. Another poem that experienced similar transformation in this food essay in Pulse Weekly.

Darrell also published Stick Figure Quarterly, an online poetry journal, and will be hosting Poetry From Your Pocket at Easton Public Market at 5 p.m. April 18.

We discussed poetry as part of the everyday and not as a lofty academic discipline.

• Prompts like: What if furniture could talk?
• Inspiration from shoes: Darrell’s poem, “Old Shoes,” from his poetry collection, Twists: Gathered Ephemera, might feature shoes in great detail but the theme is our perception of the passage of time.
• Forms like: acrostic, haiku, haibun