Once Upon a Midnight Sunrise: Writing Narrative Poems: A Master Class with Tim Seibles (via Zoom)
We often think of fiction as the realm of story and poetry as the realm of lyrical meditation, but poems can also tell stories. We all have memories of stuff that really happened—within our families, with our friends, with our romantic partners, and certainly to each of us alone. Of course, many of us also have the itch to tell tall tales or spin enhanced versions of life moments. In this workshop, we will read and listen to narrative poems by established poets, then carefully examine how they bring various events to life in a relatively short amount of space and time. We will then use prompts to write drafts of our own narrative poems. In addition to engaging several narrative strategies, we will take a closer look at how compression can energize the pulse and movement of a poem.
Born in Philadelphia in 1955, Tim Seibles is the author of seven collections of poetry, including his most recent, Voodoo Libretto (Etruscan Press, 2022), One Turn Around the Sun (Etruscan Press, 2017), and Fast Animal (2012), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and was nominated for a 2012 National Book Award. Other titles are Buffalo Head Solos (2004), Hammerlock (1999), Hurdy-Gurdy (1992), and Body Moves (1988).
Several questions drive the collection One Turn Around the Sun, the most central being how can a person stay sane when so often socio-political circumstances mock all efforts to create a livable world. Kwame Dawes says, “These are profoundly vulnerable poems that are distinguished by the risk and daring that we expect from our best poets. His alluring sensuality, and his splendid and welcoming humor will be wholly satisfied by this beautiful collection.” This book bolsters an ongoing engagement with life at a time when running away is a great temptation. Fast Animal is about the importance of remembering, the burden of race, and the meaning of true wakefulness. Publishers Weekly says, “Seibles’s refusal to sentimentalize family life or his own baser urges lends credibility to the more surreal rhetorical and metaphorical leaps, buoying the reader with him on history’s turbulent sea.”
Reflecting on writing, Seibles says, “I think poetry, if it’s going to be really engaging and engaged, has to be able to come at the issues of our lives from all kinds of angles and all kinds of ways: loudly and quietly, angrily and soothingly, with comedy and with dead seriousness. Our lives are worth every risk, every manner of approach.”
His poems have been published in the Indiana Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Cortland Review, Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry. Seibles has received fellowships from both the Provincetown Fine Arts Center and The National Endowment for the Arts. He also won the Open Voice Award from the 63rd Street Y in New York City. On July 15, 2016, Seibles was named Poet Laureate of Virginia by Governor Terry McAuliffe. Most recently, Seibles received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Furious Flower (2024).
In partnership with musician and composer Chris Brydge, Seibles released an album of selected works accompanied by jazz bass titled Something Like We Did (April, 2024). The project was born of a single live show in 2023, during which they realized that Tim’s baritone reading vocals and Chris’ upright bass were complementary in a way that revealed nuances easily missed in a traditional reading or musical performance. The duo are available for live performances of this collaborative effort.
Seibles lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where he is a member of the English Department and MFA in writing faculty of Old Dominion University. He is a teaching board member of the Muse Writers Workshop.