We are grateful to the literary presses who are co-sponsoring the 2010 Frost Place Festival and Conference on Poetry.
The 15-hour workshops will be limited to 6-8 participants each. While each workshop has a particular slant, participant work will be examined by each group throughout the week.
Martha Carlson-Bradley: On Structure
In this workshop, we will look at the role sentence structure plays in poems, the way it can create patterns, control the pace of the poem, work with or against line breaks, focus attention, and create an experience for the reader. In particular, writers will experiment with different ways to structure the same material, to experience what a fundamental poetic tool sentence structure is -- and to rattle loose some habits we may have fallen into. We'll also discuss syntax in poems by established writers. Come prepared to do some writing in class, with a mind to showing your exercise revisions in the workshop throughout the week.
More on Martha Carlson-Bradley...
Christina Davis: Ourselves, I Sing: Poems of Selfhood and Humanhood
In a country that prides itself on self-reliance and individualism, and that gives linguistic precedence to personal testimonial, do we nevertheless lose something when we over-rely on the first-person as the sole authenticating voice? And in such a potentially insular art form as poetry, do we further risk what George Oppen called the "shipwreck of the singular"? Through daily in-class exercises, "take-home" assignments, and readings from an inspiring array of classical and experimental poems, we will refine our ability to sing ourselves authentically, harnessing the fullness of our unique experiences, family histories, philosophies and fields of knowledge, while at the same time exploring strategies for overcoming our poetic isolationism and developing new means for speaking and testifying to (and for) our larger humanity.
Blas Falconer: Tradition and the Individual Talent
Gregory Orr proposes that people are born with one of four temperaments, and that each temperament determines the essential qualities of the poems we write. Using Orr's theory as a springboard, we will identify each writer's strengths and those areas that still need development. After examining poems that demonstrate an expertise with these poetic elements, we will complete a series of writing exercises to generate new work and develop skills that complement each person's individual talents. Finally, we will workshop new poems generated by the class, offering constructive criticism and due praise.
Tom Healy: Diving into the Ocean of the Unsayable
Italo Calvino called the unconscious "the ocean of the unsayable." In this workshop, we are going to take risks beyond our usual writing. We are going to dive deep into the ocean of thoughts, memories and feelings we keep hidden from others and ourselves. This is a workshop about making art of difficult subjects. How do we transform the unsayable into poetry? How do we shape our pain, loss, anger and fear into words that can live outside ourselves? We will examine the strategies of other poets and do exercises to give ourselves new confidence and control to write the poems that matter most to us.
Gregory Pardlo: What Is At Stake
We are often quick to dismiss navel gazing as a mere form of egotism. Not to sound "new-agey," but we overlook the potential of the omphalos to direct and clarify the imagination. If we consider that the universal is achieved through the specific, it is in the interest of poets to have a means of identifying and discussing habits of mind. In this workshop, we will read a variety of poems to identify distinguishing characteristics of the lyric, narrative and dramatic impulses in order to identify and understand those impulses more clearly in participant's poems. We will practice various techniques of close reading, keeping in mind that what is at stake for the poet, and what is at stake in the poem, are not necessarily the same thing. We want to know the difference.
One often hears that sound and sense must work together in a successful poem that the music of a poet's language ought ideally to fit neatly into the larger ambitions of her poem. During the week, as we look at participants' poems each day, we will also discuss work by poets who use music in opposition to their stated meanings, when the sound of the poem works as a counterpoint to the sense -- or even, at times, undercuts it. In workshop, we will examine how we can communicate precise meaning in our poems not merely through the literal and suggested meanings of images, metaphors and symbols, but through the sounds of words. The workshop will include close readings of participants' poems along with the works of diverse poets, as well as exercises for writers.
Martha Rhodes: The Difficult and Rewarding Work of Revision
Revision doesn't always make a poem better. Indeed, we are all capable of offering suggestions for a poem that can muck up the poem. However, the more we revise our poems, for better or for worse, the stronger we become as writers. We develop and grow muscles. We become more agile as we learn to move around and through our poems. This athleticism will pay off for the poems in front of us and for the poems yet to be written. This workshop will focus on learning how to move around in our poems, sometimes subtly, sometimes quite radically. Not only will we look at how small adjustments can impact a poem, we'll investigate new, unchartered terrain. Mostly, we'll learn that we can dare to be bold in the revision process. After all, our initial drafts won't spontaneously combust. We can always return to earlier versions. We'll discover that by allowing ourselves to really challenge our poems, we can bring more complexity, depth, dimension, and texture to our work.
Ellen Doré Watson: Shaking Loose / Shaping Up
This workshop will include writing and critiquing, and it's for writers who are ready to go to new places. We'll explore shape and wordplay as paths to composition and to revision, producing new poems in class and out; we'll talk about how to follow the poem where it wants to go, as opposed to fleshing out preconceptions or exerting our will (both as poets and critics); and we'll talk about the difference between the richness of ambiguity and frustration of impenetrability. Our overall goal is to develop tools both to shake poems loose and to re-imagine works-in-progress.
Baron Wormser: Poetic Possibility
Ezra Pound once remarked in an interview that most poems he read were half-written. This workshop will be devoted to looking for those places in a poem that offer possibilities that aren't taken. Often the issues are narrative or a matter of some gist or image that hasn't been explored. Often the issues have to do with conceptual notions or ostensible subjects that straitjacket the imaginative life of the poem. There is no formula for going further but in this workshop we will ask numerous "what if" questions that will prod the poem toward its fullness.
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