In this workshop, participants will struggle through several drafts of a few poems between 50 and 150 lines in length. Perhaps it seems silly to write those numbers down as meaningful parameters, but in the instructor’s experience that’s where a distinct kind of poem resides, one with a sustained tone and many twists and turns: the sort of poem that nobody quite knows what to do with, that doesn’t fit in a gift box, that sticks out like cold feet from the end of the bed. Some examples: Yeats’ “Easter 1916,” Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses,” and Olena Kalytiak Davis’s “The Lyric ‘I’ Drives to Pick up Her Children from School.” We will look at these and other examples to discern what techniques, tendencies, and tics it takes in terms of premise, structure and development to sing/say this kind of long song.