No, Dear 2026 Workshop Series - May Edition: Muscle & Breath: Crafting Poems that Move, facilitated by Karen Hildebrand. . . Monday, May 11, 7-9pm on Zoom . . . In this generative session, we will consider how we as poets can benefit from looking at our creative work through a lens of movement. Martha Graham famously used a combination of muscle and breath to express dramatic emotional themes in her modern dance concert works. Her signature move, the contraction, is a stylized way of engaging the core abdominal muscles while exhaling. The effect is like a punch to the gut. In poetry, “muscle” might refer to our subject matter and the diction and syntax used to reveal it; while “breath” would be about pacing—how fast or slow we read a poem and the way its elements affect that speed. During our time together we’ll discuss a few example poems from this perspective, then we’ll conduct our own research: How might the observation of movement inspire or enhance our own writing? We will watch short video clips of dancers performing, and make notes about what we see, feel, and hear. Afterward, we will use these notes to begin drafting our own poems.