Revising and Generating Poems
For so many poets over the years, The Frost Place workshop has offered writers at every level of experience the opportunity to grow as writers. The Intensive Poetry Workshop offers 15 hours of poetry workshops by two instructors over three days. Participants will meet for three hours each morning, break for lunch, and reconvene in the afternoon for two more hours of workshop. Maximum 8 participants.
MORNING SESSIONS with Martha Rhodes 9:30-12:30
This workshop will focus on revision, both "conventional" editing and a more radical approach to working on your poems where we will investigate different avenues that our poems might take. We will look at participants' work. We'll learn, too, how to generate new work during the revision process. We'll devote some time each morning to looking at poems by such writers as Bishop, Frost, Roethke, and others. There will be some exercises and assignments to help prompt revision and new work.
All discussion will be focused on understanding the choices we've made in drafting our poems and the choices we can still make for subsequent drafts.
AFTERNOON SESSIONS with Ellen Doré Watson 2:00-4:00
This workshop provides new tools for helping poems happen and for re-imagining our first drafts. In some sessions, we banish our critical selves from the room and write from a variety of cues (linguistic, thematic, structural); in others, we give careful reading and good-spirited critique to these works-in-progress. We'll ask our poems where they mean to go and ourselves how to deepen our understanding of the journey. We'll explore forms and wordplay as paths to composition and to revision, and we'll discuss revising toward (both!) clarity and mystery.
The schedule:
Arrive August 3rd afternoon
5:00 Reception
Short readings by Martha and Ellen
7:00 Dinner with Martha and Ellen, or on your own
August 4th, 5th, and 6th Workshops 9:30-12:30 and 2:00-4:00
Lunches and dinners with Martha and Ellen in town, or on your own
Readings at The Frost Place each evening at 8:
August 4th: Jeffrey Harrison
August 5th: Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Rigoberto González
August 6th: Martha Collins
Depart August 7th
Application Process and Fees:
Applications
Send a cover letter and 4 poems (max 5 pages total) to the attention of: Therese Reger, The Frost Place, P.O. Box 74, Franconia, NH 03580 by May 1st. Admissions are on a rolling basis, until the workshop is filled.
Tuition
For the 2009 Intensive Workshop, tuition will be $550. A deposit of $275 is due upon acceptance, the remaining $275 by July 1. Meals and lodging are not included.
Accommodations
Franconia and neighboring towns offer lodging for every budget. See suggestions here
FACULTY
Martha Rhodes is the author of three collections of poetry: Mother Quiet, Perfect Disappearance (Green Rose Prize), and At the Gate. She is the co-editor of the Four Way Readers # 1 and 2.
Her poems have been anthologized widely and have appeared in such journals as Agni, The American Poetry Review, Fence, New England Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and TriQuarterly, among others. She is a member of the poetry faculties of Sarah Lawrence College and The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and has taught at Emerson College, The New School, and University of California, Irvine. Rhodes is the founding editor and the director of Four Way Books, a literary press located in New York City. She has taught at The Frost Place and has been a member of The Frost Place community for over a decade.
Ellen Doré Watson serves as Director of the Poetry Center at Smith College and as translation editor of The Massachusetts Review; she is also a member of the editorial board of Alice James Books. Author of four books of poetry, most recently, This Sharpening, from Tupelo Press, her individual poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including The American Poetry Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Among Watson's honors are a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant, a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. She has translated a dozen books from the Brazilian Portuguese, including The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems of Adélia Prado, and co-translates contemporary Arabic language poetry with Saadi Simawe. Watson was a resident faculty member at The Frost Place in 2007.
Programs 
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P.O. Box 74 , Ridge Road, Franconia, NH 03580
Telephone: (603) 823–5510
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