What separates poetry from other writing disciplines is its music. This exploration will focus on line structure and the aspects of language that create inventive rhythm and flow, admitting no impediment. With an emphasis on editing, the discussion will include examples of the power of the action verb, why imagination is more important than knowledge, honoring compression, and exercises designed to make poems more dynamic and muscular on the page. This workshop will show why, as rhythmic beings, we assimilate language through rhythm, and how to use the understanding of rhythm and music to jumpstart the creative process. Part of the discussion will deal with the pragmatic process of getting your work published and what an editor is looking for when choosing a poem. There will be several exercises designed to boost the creative imagination, and prompts that will guarantee that the participants will leave with poems already in motion.

Keith Flynn is the award-winning author of eight books, including six collections of poetry, most recently Colony Collapse Disorder (Wings Press, 2013) and The Skin of Meaning (Red Hen Press, 2020) and two collections of essays, The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz and Memory: How to Make Your Poetry Swing (Writer's Digest Books, 2007), and the forthcoming Prosperity Gospel: Portraits of the Great Recession (Redhawk Publications, 2021). His award-winning poetry and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies around the world. He has been awarded the Sandburg Prize for poetry, a 2013 NC Literary Fellowship, the ASCAP Emerging Songwriter Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award, and was twice named the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for North Carolina. Flynn is founder and managing editor of The Asheville Poetry Review, which began publishing in 1994. He attended Mars Hill College and the University of North Carolina at Asheville where he won the 1985 Sandburg Prize for Poetry