Speaking Truth to Power: How to Write Non-Didactic Political Poetry

This 8-week poetry workshop focuses on writing poetry that engages with social justice and politics without leaning too far into didacticism and prescriptiveness, without sounding too preachy or like a chant in a march. This workshop intends to show writers how to subtly pack a punch into a poem that leaves the reader breathless, surprised, and moved. We will be doing this by exploring different formal approaches that will help add nuance and singularity to the poems we will be writing.

Each week, we’ll be discussing a different formal approach, including:

• Direct address/letter poems
• Filtering through a lens
• Writer as expert
• Research
• Found poetry/Erasure poetry
• Villanelle, the ghazal, and the power of repetition
• Experimental poetry

We will be doing so by reading and discussing poems that utilize specific formal approaches based on the topic set for the week. Some of the writers we will be reading include Hanif Abdurraqib, Chen Chen, Canisia Lubrin, Trish Salah, Tommy Pico, Kay Gabriel, Dionne Brand, and Hala Alyan.

Furthermore, each week, workshop participants will be given writing prompts that will help them learn about the different forms and formal approaches discussed. The prompts will guide the participants in attempting to write poems using that week’s form. Finally, 1-2 writers will have their poems workshopped each week. Attendees will be asked to send in their poems a week in advance so that their peers can start workshopping the pieces at home a week in advance.

This workshop is open to poets in any stage of their development, whether they are new to writing or already have a writing practice. The goal of the workshop is for participants to leave the workshop with a deeper understanding of the ways form and craft can be used to write more impactful and unique poems that engage with social justice and undermine the white, cis, colonial patriarchal status quo. This workshop will be especially useful for writers who feel they have something to say but don’t know how to say it.

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a writer, translator, and acquisitions editor at Metonymy Press living in Tio’tia:ke. Their work has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. Their book, knot body, published by Metatron Press in 2020, was shortlisted for the QWF Concordia First Book Award, and their second book, The Good Arabs, published by Metonymy Press in 2021, was received honorary mention for the Arab American Book Awards and the Khayrallah Prize, and won the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. Their translation of Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay’s La fille d’elle-même from the French was published in Spring 2023. With co-editor Samia Marshy, they are editing El Ghourabaa, an anthology of queer and trans writing by Arab and Arabophone writers, forthcoming Spring 2024.