Writing Beyond the Single Poem: Andrew Collard on Long Poems, Sequences, and Writing Toward Possibility
by Writing Workshops Staff
A day ago
Andrew Collard finished a long sequence he had started more than five years earlier. That kind of sustained attention, the willingness to let a project evolve across years of generative phases and quiet drafting periods, is at the heart of what makes extended poetic forms so rewarding and so difficult to teach. Collard, whose debut collection Sprawl won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and a gold medal at the 2024 Midwest Book Awards, brings that deep, practiced understanding of the long poem to his new course at WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature.
In Long Poems and Sequences: Beyond the Stand-Alone Lyric, an 8-week asynchronous online workshop beginning May 4, Collard guides poets through the structural possibilities of extended forms, from documentary and hybrid poetry to serial poems and long narrative sequences. Students will generate weekly drafts, complete a full poetic sequence and a long poem, and receive detailed written feedback including line edits. With poems published in Ploughshares, AGNI, and Kenyon Review, and a second collection, Lo-Fi Citadels, just out from Wayne State University Press, Collard is a poet who thinks in sequences. In the interview below, he shares how that thinking shapes both his writing and his teaching.
Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Andrew:
Writing Workshops: Hi, Andrew. Please introduce yourself to our audience.
Andrew Collard: I'm a poet and teacher! My second book of poems, Lo-Fi Citadels, just came out with Wayne State University Press. I've taught college-level courses for 11 years, including those in creative writing, composition, literature, and film. When I'm not writing or teaching writing, I'm hanging out with my son and drinking an incredible amount of coffee.
Writing Workshops: What made you want to teach this specific class? Is it something you are focusing on in your own writing practice?
Andrew Collard: I'm a nerd for the long poem! Long poems and sequences were a large factor in drawing me to poetry as a young writer. Sequences play a large role in my books, often serving as tent pole pieces that the surrounding poems interact with in some way. Attention to long poems as a reader and writer is what drives my writing process.
"Sequences play a large role in my books, often serving as tent pole pieces that the surrounding poems interact with in some way."
Writing Workshops: Give us a breakdown of how the course is going to go. What can the students expect?
Andrew Collard: In this course we'll be dreaming up a number of different ideas for long poems and sequences and choosing one to follow to a full draft. Participants will draft shorter pieces along the way, and will have lots of new material to continue working with after the class is over.
Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?
Andrew Collard: I was lucky to encounter poetry in middle and high school. After reading EE Cummings for the first time I started cutting up all my writing and rearranging the lines to try and mimic his syntax.
Writing Workshops: What are you currently reading?
Andrew Collard: Right now I'm working my way through The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan. His book The Sonnets was an early influence on my writing but I've never read his work straight through!
Ready to move beyond the stand-alone lyric? Join Andrew for eight weeks of generative writing, close reading, and detailed feedback on your long poems and sequences.
Enroll in Long Poems & Sequences →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?
Andrew Collard: I'm always working on several things at once. I go through long generative phases where I write a lot and then put it away, and then long drafting phases where I go back and see what I have. This allows a sense of perspective that is valuable to me. I recently finished a long sequence I began over five years before. I choose based on what remains intriguing to me over time.
Writing Workshops: Where do you find inspiration?
Andrew Collard: Reading and walking! But also: records, movies, comics, video games and action figure stories with my son.
Writing Workshops: What is the best piece of writing wisdom you've received that you can pass along to our readers?
Andrew Collard: A mentor of mine would often remind me that my poems are my poems and are drawn from my own experience and language. This was very freeing--everyone's relationship to language is valid, and embracing the full breadth of it leads to our most interesting work.
"Everyone's relationship to language is valid, and embracing the full breadth of it leads to our most interesting work."
Writing Workshops: What is the worst piece of writing advice you've received, read, or heard?
Andrew Collard: It's not any one thing--any advice that is overly prescriptive as to what writing should look like is usually not helpful to me. I write into possibility.
Writing Workshops: What is your favorite book to recommend on the craft of writing?
Andrew Collard: Muriel Rukeyser's The Life of Poetry is one I return to all the time--it's a book that encourages me to think about my writing in the wider context of my life and how my life intersects with the lives of others.
That last line captures something essential about what this course offers. Writing long poems and sequences is, at its core, an act of sustained attention: to language, to structure, and to the intersections between your experience and the wider world. With readings from Gwendolyn Brooks, Muriel Rukeyser, Alice Notley, Maggie Nelson, and many others, Andrew's workshop invites poets to think modularly, drawing structural ideas from music, comics, and TV alongside poetry itself. Whether you are just beginning to experiment with extended forms or looking for a rigorous framework to finish a project you have been circling for years, this course will give you the tools, the community, and the momentum to write toward possibility.
Eight weeks. A complete sequence. A finished long poem. New ways of thinking about what poetry can hold. Join Andrew Collard this May.
Save Your Seat in Long Poems & Sequences →WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
