The Surrealist's Toolkit: Creating Beautiful Prose Poems from Everyday Madness

The Editor-In-Cheif at ONLY POEMS and award winning poet Karan Kapoor will teach this workshop from August 5 - August 29, 2024.

Surrealism conjures Dali, Buñuel, Pizarnik. Prose poems conjure – for a lot of people – confusion. It’s a match made in dog heaven. The prose poem is the most unique form of poetry because it is not poetry and also not prose. Learn the art of the prose poem and harness the power of surrealism to great tiny prose gems you can submit across the genre map (which is really a crayon-etched echo of a map, let’s be honest).

Workshop takeaways

• Explore the best surreal (weird/absurd/bizarre) prose poems and learn how to “uncraft” them

• Learn 8 Surrealist Games to get their creative juices flowing

• Find the story they want to tell using Surrealist Games

• Compose a personalized surrealist’s toolkit

• Prepare 4 prose poems centered around 4 unique surreal poetry techniques

Why take this class with Karan?

Much of my poetry these days is composed as prose poems. I have cheated the publishing process and totally submitted these prose poems as creative nonfiction and flash fiction. The cheating has paid off wonderfully. I like prose poems. I’m okay with cheating. I’m weird. You’ll probably teach me more than I’ll teach you. But I can teach you how to teach me more. So, let’s go.

Subscribe now to receive these lessons as soon as they post. As always, half of the curriculum will be free to all subscribers, with the option to upgrade and access this and all of our workshops in full for $10/mo.

Bio: Karan Kapoor is an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech. Originally from New Delhi, they have many years of experience in publishing, design, and editing. A finalist for the Diode, Tusculum Review, and Iron Horse Literary Review chapbook prizes, their poems appear in AGNI, Shenandoah, Colorado Review, Cincinnati Review, North American Review, The Margins, Rattle and elsewhere. Their poetry has been honored with the Red Wheelbarrow Prize, James Hearst Poetry Prize, and Bellevue Literary Review Poetry Prize, and more. Their fiction appears in JOYLAND and the other side of hope, and translations in The Offing and The Los Angeles Review.