I wish I could upload a video clip of Dr. Taylor Byas’s workshop, but I’m afraid doing so might infringe on intellectual property rights, so I refrained. Without the audio and visuals, it’s difficult to fully convey the brilliance of her workshop. Why? Because her workshop, like her readings, is a live performance.
She’s not just delivering content—she’s orchestrating it. Her voice rises and falls with intention. She varies her pitch, volume, and pacing, using silence as effectively as sound. Her gestures punctuate her points, bringing the material to life. Each sentence carries a rhythm, each pause a deliberate beat. We weren’t just educated; we were entertained. It felt as though she was conducting a symphony of ideas, pulling us into the energy of her words.
The title of Dr. Taylor Byas’s workshop is "Possibility Within Poetic Form." Possibility, she emphasizes, is endless—and she hones in on texture. But what exactly is texture in poetry? According to Amanda Starling Gould, a textured poem possesses “extralinguistic features that give a poem a certain visual surface texture.” A textured poem is a poem with “voices, parts, moving parts, interactive parts, and linked parts.”
How does one add texture to a poem? There are countless methods, of course, and in this one-hour workshop, Dr. Byas focuses on punctuation. She first introduces us to Natasha Trethewey’s poem “Rotation.” You can click the link to check the full text of "Rotation."
"Rotation" is a pantoum. The pantoum is a poetic form made up of four-line stanzas, where the second and fourth lines of one stanza become the first and third lines of the next. The final line often repeats the first. Due to this repetition, poets frequently shift the meaning of identical word combinations by altering punctuation, making pantoums perfect for us to observe how punctuation creates multiple layers of meaning.
Dr. Byas gives us a few minutes to read the poem on our own, then invites us to discuss the punctuation. Many in the audience share their findings. Here's a finding that I think perticularly insightful:
Let's look at the first two lines of "Rotation":
"Like the moon that night, my father—
a distant body, white and luminous."
Then look at the last two lines:
"He was already turning to go, waning
like the moon that night—my father."
In the first line, the comma after "like the moon that night" introduces an appositive, linking "my father" directly to the moon, as if equating them. The simile establishes a tone of reflection and longing. By contrast, in the last line, the em dash (—) after "like the moon that night" feels like a grasping gesture—an arm outstretched, trying to hold on to the father, who is fading like the moon—symbolizing a final, painful separation.
I feel so enlightened! After the workshop, I couldn’t wait to experiment with new punctuation in my manuscript.
During the evening reading session, Dr. Byas read poems from her newest poetry collection, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, as well as selections from her upcoming collection.
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