In this workshop, we'll explore the creative crossroads between poetry and cinema, and learn how poets and filmmakers use image, language, and memory to create emotionally resonant work. Drawing on poems, screenplay excerpts, and film clips, we'll examine how a single lyric image can become the foundation for character, scene, and narrative, with a special focus on crafting the opening pages of a screenplay. Whether you're interested in writing poetry, screenplays, or both, you'll leave with practical strategies for getting started, shaping your first pages, and approaching revision with fresh eyes. SCHEDULE9:30-10:30 AM - John Wall Barger: Exploring Tarkovsky’s 1966 Soviet-Russian film Andrei Rublev, and poems by Marie Howe, to show how a film is like a poem, and how watching great films can inspire us to write poems. 11:00 AM-12:00 PM - Elena Karina Byrne: Poetry's Cinematic Propositions; how poetry and film share key elements of discovery, utilizing the transformative ingredients of language, action, and image. 12:00-1:30 PM - Lunch provided. 1:30-3:00 PM - Perry Janes: How the lyric image crosses from poetry to film, and how that can serve as an originating point for your screenplay John Wall Barger is the author of seven books of poems and a collection of essays. His latest book of poems, Resurrection Pie, just came out with LSU Press. He’s a contract editor for Frontenac House, lives in Vermont, and lectures in the Writing Program at Dartmouth College. Elena Karina Byrne is a screenwriter, essayist, reviewer, multi-media artist, and editor. She also works as a freelance lecturer and national arts programs curator. Author of five collections of poetry including If This Makes You Nervous (Omnidawn), No, Don’t (What Books Press), Squander (Omnidawn), MASQUE (Tupelo Press), and The Flammable Bird (Zoo Press/Tupelo Press), Elena is a Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry recipient. Her poems, reviews, essays, and interviews can be found in POETRY, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Poetry International, Poetry Daily, Ploughshares, BOMB, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, and elsewhere. Perry Janes is the author of the poetry collection FIND ME WHEN YOU’RE READY (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, 2024), winner of the Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, his poems and short stories have appeared in POETRY, Electric Literature, Poem-a-Day, Best New Poets, The Threepenny Review, Zyzzyva, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Subtropics, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Adroit Journal, The Missouri Review, and others. He earned his MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College, and his BA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he was a 5-time recipient of the Hopwood Award. Vievee Francis is the author of five books of poetry: Blue-Tail Fly (2007), Horse in the Dark (2010), Forest Primeval (2016), The Shared World (2023), and the forthcoming Cleaning the Houses of the Dead. Born in West Texas and raised in Metropolitan Detroit, Francis has received numerous awards and recognition for her work including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2024), a Vermont Book Award (2023), the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry (2021), the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award (2017), and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award (2016). Francis, along with composer Jonathan Berger and artist Enrico Riley, wrote the libretto for the transdisciplinary opera The Ritual of Breath which premiered in 2022. She has served as an Associate Editor for Callaloo and currently holds the Burlington Northern Foundation Professorship in Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.