Pop-Up Poetry Workshop: Unbalanced, but stable

Pop-Up Poetry Workshop: Unbalanced, but stable with Toya Brown

Saturday, September 17, 2022
2 PM – 5 PM AKDT

Mountain View Library
120 Bragaw St.
Anchorage, AK 99508

Free and open to the public!

This workshop was made possible through a grant from Alaska State Council on the Arts.

Co-sponsored by the Anchorage Library.

Please note: All participants in the workshop are encouraged to be masked.

The problem with poetry is….

Explaining poetry to people is like talking to kleptomaniacs, they always take things literally.

Poetry has an eternal resource of style, genre, and rules. Most workshops teach you how to use and apply these rules, but what if we didn’t?

What if we focused on making, creating and using ingenuity to develop revolutionary ideas like never seen before?

What if we embrace the discomfort of being unbalanced, but learn to create stable and steady flows of content?

This workshop is life support for creativity. We are going to bend the rules till they flat out break and learn how to do poetry vers libre. All levels beginners, intermediate, and advanced writers will benefit.

If you think unimaginative poetry is a problem, just wait till you see the solution!

Toya Brown’s work is an exploratory art form of the intersection between societal influence and self discovery. Her work will make you pause, possibly cry, potentially laugh, and most importantly; question everything. She is an artist, mother, hiker, and most importantly a spitter when speaking so the front row is always kept empty. Her work is an assiduous effort at earnest self reflection. She paints a world you can’t help but to enter through the page.

She has published a short pamphlet of poems entitled, Through the Window Pains and can be found in different publishing’s like Alaska Women Speak and FORUM magazine. She has run several writing work shops including a healing through the arts program where she taught literary techniques to Alaska’s at risk youth.

I’m looking for a poem with no words. Can you help me find it? I know it seems like an impossible task, but aren’t we all searching for the impossible? A feeling. A voice with no sound that speaks to our soul. I want to find that hymn. And when I do I will wrap my voice around it with movements of light. I will color with the music notes of feelings and forte so loud I will be deaf to the world and drowned in my own sound. -Toya Brown (Unnamed Poem 2022)

Workshop is free and open to all. Masks encouraged.