Form is not a fixture but an activity…Writing’s forms are not merely shapes but forces expressing how, where, and why the writing moves.
– Lyn Hejinian
Apply for our 2025 Spring Prosody Workshop here!
Each year, Omnidawn offers a class/workshop unlike any other. Prosody is the study and application of poetic techniques that heighten the power of one’s writing. We have our own take on prosody. David Koehn’s astute methods of instruction offer the opportunity to experience what Donald Revell in Compendium‘s introduction describes as “the grammars of desire [which] sanctify the secular ground of poemmaking…”
Writers taking this online course will benefit from having a poem of theirs discussed each week by David Koehn with input from Rusty Morrison. This online course will educate attendees on prosody using the syllabus of Donald Justice, Compendium. On the weekly zoom meetings, attendees will meet some of the finest writers in poetry. Each week, we will feature a short talk by a guest poet, followed by a Q&A; each poet will share with candor the creative directions, the risks, the challenges, they each face in their own work.
We meet every Sunday, 10 AM – Noon PST, for 6 weeks, from April 6th –
May 11th, 2025. The schedule of guest poets participating in the 2024 Prosody Class/Workshop (click through for guest bios):
Apply here: https://omnidawn.submittable.com/submit
Prosody Workshop Endorsements:
“Omnidawn’s online “Prosody & Revision” course offered me new strategies to break the chain of patterned methods of composition and revision in my poems. Most significantly, the course offered me a leg up and into material related to family trauma that I had thought previously impenetrable. Looking at my poems through the lens of prosody was invaluable, which is to say important for my development as a poet, and equally important, it was fun! To study poetry with David Koehn, Rusty Morrison, the weekly amazing guest poets, and the course’s students is to be welcomed into a most special community. Take this course; you know you want to!”?
—Jami Macarty, author of Landscape of The Wait, (Finishing Line Press, 2017)
“Go beyond your intentions. That is where the scaffolding of poetic constraints can lead… After many years of workshoping in universities, I joined Omnidawn’s “Prosody & Revision” to challenge my manuscript outside the traditional workshop setting…. David Koehn, Rusty Morrison, and the workshop’s students strengthened my work…push[ing] my work into unexpected directions.”
—Eric Anderson, previous Prosody student and Iowa Writers Workshop alumnus
Tuition: Sliding Scale: $800 – $1,000
(any amount from $800 to $1,000. it’s your choice.)
(90% of which is tax-deductible, donated to Omnidawn Publishing, a fiscally sponsored 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization).
Everyone who has submitted work to an Omnidawn Contest is eligible for 20 percent off class fees.
https://omnidawn.submittable.com/submit
thank you!
PARTIAL SCHOLARSHIPS AVAILABLE: write to Rusty Morrison for scholarship information.
Two good things to tell you:
1. All sessions are recorded, so all who are participants can listen to the sessions again and again. So, this means that if you need to miss a week, then you still will be able to hear this recording of the featured guest and the workshop.
2. If something happens to you during the course (for instance, an unexpected serious illness) and you’re unable to continue participating in the course, then you can take the course again next year for no charge.
Omnidawn Publishing is very grateful to David Koehn and to all of the stellar poets who are donating their time to this workshop.
David Koehn’s first chapbook Coil (University of Alaska, 1998), won the Midnight Sun Chapbook Contest. His first full-length manuscript, Twine (Bauhan Publishing, 2013), won the May Sarton Poetry Prize.
David coedited Compendium, (Omnidawn Publishing, 2017), a text offering Donald Justice’s original syllabus on prosody. David’s second full-length book of poetry, Scatterplot, was published by Omnidawn in 2020, and his third book, SUR, was published in 2024. He collaborated with poet Rebecca Resinski on intervals of. David holds an MFA from the University of Florida, a Bachelors in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon, an M.Ed (TFA) from the University of Alaska. David’s writing appears in a range of magazines including Prairie Schooner, Gargoyle, Hotel Amerika, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Volt, Carolina Quarterly, Diagram, McSweeney’s, The Greensboro Review, North American Review, and many others. For more info see: davidkoehn.com