by Writing Workshops Staff
2 months ago
There's a moment in every great film when the camera lingers, not on the explosion or the kiss, but on the way afternoon light catches dust motes in a widow's kitchen, or how a child's fingers trace the condensation on a car window during a long drive home. It's in these hyperspecific details that cinema transcends mere narrative to become something closer to poetry. Seth Leeper, a Brooklyn-based poet and educator, has spent years working in the opposite direction: teaching poets how to make their verses feel as immediate and visceral as scenes flickering across a darkened theater.
"I spent many years trying to write poems as still life paintings sprung into action," Leeper says. "I started framing this cinematically and thinking about how both film and poetic devices can be utilized to achieve these effects within the poem." It's this intersection, where the written word meets the visual medium, that forms the backbone of his upcoming five-week workshop, Hi-Definition Poetry: Creating Cinematic Scenes.
By day, Leeper works with students with disabilities in the New York City public school system, a job that has taught him something essential about attention, how to notice what others might overlook, how to find the extraordinary gesture buried within the mundane moment. By night, he crafts what he calls "Pantoublocks," his invented form that merges the cyclical nature of pantoums with prose poetry's expansive breath. His work, which has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Prairie Schooner, and Salamander, among others, consistently returns to what he describes as "the soul embodied in the flesh", that precise moment where the abstract becomes startlingly, uncomfortably real.
The workshop promises something both practical and transformative: the ability to write poems that don't just describe experience but make readers feel as though they're inhabiting it. Through careful study of poets like Ada Limón, Louise Glück, and Brigit Pegeen Kelly, participants will learn what Leeper calls the "micro level details that intensify the macro level picture"—how the particular gesture or environmental detail can suddenly expand a poem's emotional geography from intimate to infinite.
"A poem that leans on the extreme of telling doesn't offer the reader an opportunity to see or feel," Leeper explains. "Conversely, the poem that leans too much on showing risks not saying anything at all, but still needs the courage to let the images speak for themselves." It's this delicate balance—between revelation and restraint, between the close-up and the wide shot—that his workshop promises to explore.
For Leeper, poetry's cinematic potential isn't just metaphorical. In an age when our attention is constantly fragmented, when we consume stories in Instagram squares and TikTok snippets, the poet who can create what he calls "scenes that feel like they're being projected from the page and into our minds and living rooms" possesses a crucial skill. They understand that in our image-saturated world, the most radical act might be to slow down, to linger, to make the reader not just read a poem but experience it—frame by careful frame, line by luminous line.
Writing Workshops: Please introduce yourself to our audience.
Seth Leeper: Hi there! I'm Seth Leeper, a poet and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. I'm a cat dad and I teach in a New York City Public School by day, working with students with disabilities. As a poet, I've written in many styles and forms, including more formal and experimental structures. I possess a wide palette as a reader, as well, and am interested in range more than the refinement of a single aesthetic in both ventures. I like breaking rules as much as I like knowing them.
Several of my Pantoublocks, an invented form in which the pantoum and prose block are merged, have been published in various online and print journals. I'm currently preoccupied with the idea of exploring the full spectrum of form, pushing it to its outer most edges until it breaks.
I don't limit myself to specific themes in what I read and write. Lately, however, prominent themes of grief, the soul embodied in the flesh, family, queer sex and history, Buddhism, and anxiety have emerged in my work.
Poets I consistently return to for inspiration include Marie Howe, John Murillo, Louise Gluck, Evie Shockley, Diane Seuss, Victoria Chang, Danez Smith, and Donika Kelly.
Writing Workshops: What made you want to teach this specific class? Is it something you are focusing on in your own writing practice? Have you noticed a need to focus on this element of craft?
Seth Leeper: This will be the second iteration of this workshop. The first was really fun and meaningful and I wanted to bring to it a new audience. The theme of the class is an element of craft that I pursued for many years: trying to evoke in hyper detail a particular scene within a poem. At this point in my craft, I'd like to think it's been incorporated into my voice and process. I spent many years trying to write poems as still life paintings sprung into action. I started framing this cinematically and thinking about how both film and poetic devices can be utilized to achieve these effects within the poem.
In terms of noticing a need, I do think there is a tendency for some poets, (in early drafting stages, or early in their process of developing their own voice), to struggle with the balance of showing and telling. I'm not one to tell you to do one over the other, but employing both of these in precise amounts is what will determine the success of a poem. A poem that leans on the extreme of telling doesn't offer the reader an opportunity to see or feel. Conversely, the poem that leans too much on showing risks not saying anything at all, but still needs the courage to let the images speak for themselves.
Writing Workshops: Give us a breakdown of how the course is going to go. What can the students expect? What is your favorite part about this class you've dreamed up?
Seth Leeper: Students can expect a breakdown of the poetic and/or cinematic devices being employed and modeled by exemplars text(s), to engage in short dialogues around the texts, then to have time to write from prompts inspired by the texts before coming together for share outs and feedback. We'll repeat a similar cycle two or three times (or more if time allows) within the span of our two hour session and participants will be given prompts to write towards during their time away. The fifth week will be a workshopping-focused session where participants will bring a piece they want to share to receive deeper feedback on.
Writing Workshops: What was your first literary crush?
Seth Leeper: (I'm interpreting crush here to mean true soul imprint as opposed to romance.) Probably Amelia Bedelia. Honestly, I would have made that date cake the same!
But my real honest answer would be Tori Amos. I started writing poetry because I wanted to record an album and my earliest poems were attempts to emulate songs from "Boys For Pele" and "From The Choirgirl Hotel".
Literary romantic crush was probably Christopher Rice whom I met once in my 20s and he was lovely. In high school I dreamt I'd be one half of a power couple with him or Rufus Wainwright but I believe they're both in happy committed relationships now to their respective partners, and I'm happy for them. [] can call me though!
Writing Workshops: What are you currently reading?
Seth Leeper: I just finished Zami by Audre Lorde, which was fabulous. Books I recently read that everyone should be reading: Cowboy Park by Eduardo Leyva-Martinez, At The End of the World There is a Pond by Steven Duong, Good Son by Kyle Liang, Song of My Softening by Omotara James, Interstitial Archeology by Felicia Zamora, I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always by Douglas Kearney, Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms by Joan Kwon Glass, and I would be remiss not to mention Bluff by Danez Smith and Ours by Phillip B. Williams.
Writing Workshops: How do you choose what you're working on? When do you know it is the next thing you want to write all the way to THE END?
Seth Leeper: I think your work finds you as much as you find it. It's equal parts a cerebral process and spiritual dance. An attunement to the source you're dialed into. I do tend to write into projects, but only once I realize I have enough poems that seem to be speaking to each other. I have killed projects before by rushing the process, by compiling prematurely.
Writing into the Pantoublock form was a project of necessity because I needed distance between myself and the subject matter, (grief), and form was the buffer. In this way, the project emerged and announced itself, but it continues to be open ended. It will culminate as my thesis for my MFA degree at Randolph College.
In terms of the second question, I don't know that you know until you reach the end, and sometimes the end is ambiguous, and sometimes we're not given the gift of closure. Even by ourselves, to ourselves.
Writing Workshops: Where do you find inspiration?
Seth Leeper: Listening. Remaining open to the stimuli that drives me to the page. (Well, honestly, the keypad, because I type everything.) It sounds trite but the act of living. We experience and take in thousands if not millions of micro and macro images everyday, have countless interactions that are good, bad, or indifferent. We participate in so many exchanges with our environment, and we process all of it over time. Some of it will emerge in a poem tomorrow, perhaps a decade from the point of input.
We're often in conversation with other poets and writers even if we're not aware of it. Reading is essential. Living and reading.
Writing Workshops: What is the best piece of writing wisdom you've received that you can pass along to our readers? How did it impact your work? Why has this advice stuck with you?
Seth Leeper: I know I have permission to reference this from a prior interview, so I'm going to shout out the great Carlie Hoffman. I walked away from her workshops with a real fixation on the impact of the line break. It's an important focus because it determines so much about the line as a lingual unit. Breaking too early can completely obfuscate the image contained within the line, or disrupt an argument in a way that leads to unproductive mystery. Breaking at the right place can allow the image to occupy its proper place within the line. Strategic line breaks can also add double or multiple meanings to the final word within the line, and, thus, the line itself. The double meaning can contain a provocation, or a transformation of an image, or even upend a reader's expectations. We haven't even tapped the rhythmic implications! But yes, line breaks are everything.
Writing Workshops: What is your favorite book to recommend on the craft of writing? Why this book?
Seth Leeper: It's not strictly a book on craft, per se, but Evie Shockley's a half red sea is required reading for anyone interested in form, or playing with language inclusive of, and beyond, the free verse lyric poem. In my opinion, it's a poet's bible, and studying it cracked me open on a craft and musical level. Her innovation of classic forms like the pantoum and sonnet through her use of syllabics, anaphora, and slant rhymes are masterful and instructional. There are also layers of social commentary embedded into the work, some of which are more obvious, some of which are less so, and I'm not qualified to speak to with authority and authenticity. (Okay, cheating, but also read her latest: "Suddenly We"!) I also appreciated reading Carl Phillip's approach to the craft essay in his meditations contained in My Trade is Mystery.
Writing Workshops: What's your teaching vibe?
Seth Leeper: I teach poetry workshops to adults with the hope that in addition to imparting craft knowledge and inspiration for generating meaningful work, I can facilitate an environment where participants feel safe to take risks and ideally transform something within themselves through the page or screen. Of course, this is an aspirational hope. It's important to me that, at minimum, participants walk away with tools and written drafts that have value to them.
Learn more about Seth's upcoming class, Hi-Definition Poetry: Creating Cinematic Scenes 5-Week Generative Zoom Workshop, and sign up now to avoid the waitlist.
Instructor Seth Leeper is a queer poet. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Foglifter, Waxwing, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, OnlyPoems, Salamander, and Greensboro Review. He holds an M.S. in Special Education from Pace University and B.A. in Creative Writing and Fashion Journalism from San Francisco State University. He is a candidate in the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Randolph College and also teaches for Brooklyn Poets.
