“Picnic, Lightning”:
Brevity in the Very Short Poem
Sunday, Sept. 29, 10am ET

SOLD OUT! — This program has reached maximum registrant capacity. We hope you’ll register for other Festival programs!

Emily Dickinson is one of the greatest masters of the short poem. In this workshop for writers at all stages in their practice, we’ll focus on the Very Short Poem, the highly pressurized lyric that casts off a resonance far bigger than its real estate.

Looking at poems by Dickinson, Ross Gay, Jane Kenyon, Bill Knott, Lorine Niedecker, and Martha Rhodes, we’ll explore how a poem can become more focused and intense with strategies of inference, implication, subordination, and exclusion. Our time together will include a generative exercise— please join us to add the VSP to your poetic toolbox!

About the Poet
PATRICK DONNELLY is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Willow Hammer (Four Way Books, 2025), and Little-Known Operas (Four Way Books, 2019). Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2012), was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Donnelly is Program Director of The Frost Place, Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, NH, now a center for poetry and the arts. Donnelly’s translations with Stephen D. Miller of classical Japanese poetry were awarded the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature by Columbia University. A former Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, Donnelly’s poems explore topics like same-sex love and desire and the AIDS epidemic with lyric strategies.