No Breaks: A Prose Poetry Workshop - LitFest Local 2025

“a prose poem is a poem without line breaks” – Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Penguin Book of The Prose Poem
“The difference is spreading.” – Gertrude Stein, ‘A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass’

In this workshop, Ellora Sutton explores the borderless field of prose poetry and the tools a poet might deploy to keep one’s prose poetic.
The prose poem is an exciting space – a space of possibility, of otherness, of slippage and surrealism. It’s a refusal of the rules, a defiance of expectation. It’s a taking up of space on the page, a glut, a blurry abundance, a dare. It’s a haunting, a chimera. It can be a disguise, taking many forms – a joke, an essay, a warning, a wander.

Ellora Sutton is a poet and PhD student based in Hampshire. She was the Poetry Book Society Spring 2023 Pamphlet Choice with Antonyms for Burial (Fourteen Poems, 2022); her latest pamphlet is Artisanal Slush (Verve, 2023). She won the Mslexia Poetry Competition with a prose poem in 2020.