THE END OF THE LINE ✦ Todd Dillard

The end of the line in a poem is one of poetry's defining features, a place where the poem can gain meaning and momentum as it flows down the page, and yet many poets break their lines by intuition or where they feel a breath should be. In this workshop, we will decouple the idea of a line break from historical influence and intuition, and explore a variety of craft strategies to use when considering how to break a line. 

We will look at several poems that wield the power of the line break both overtly and covertly, and then we will have generative exercises centered around novel ways to break the line. 

In the second half of this course, we will workshop poems attendees have brought--whether they have been published or not--with a particular focus on how to approach improving line work when editing a poem and deploying the strategies reviewed in the beginning of the workshop. 

Informative, generative, and leading with examples, this workshop will resonate through your writing practice for many years to come. 

• Something to take notes with and to write down poems.
• Please note: this workshop will have a PowerPoint presentation, which will be disseminated to attendees following the workshop. 
• 2 poems to workshop 

Todd Dillard is a poet and editor from Houston, Texas currently working as a writer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous prestigious journals, including The Threepenny Review, Southern Review, Waxwing, The Adroit Journal, Poet Lore, Guernica, Pleiades, and many more. His debut collection Ways We Vanish was a finalist for the 2021 Balcones Poetry Award, and his current manuscript Pear Snow was a finalist for the 2025 Donald Hall AWP Poetry Prize. In 2024, he was the most-read poet on Only Poems, and in 2025 he was a finalist for Poet of the Year at Only Poems as well. His chapbook Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance is available from Variant Literature.