Workshops are limited to 12 qualified participants and 3 auditors to provide a meaningful level of discussion, and careful, informed attention to your work. Beginning poets, shy about sharing their poems, should consider auditing a workshop as a great way to learn by observing and listening. Review our Application Guidelines for more details and the workshop descriptions that follow on this page. Click the following link to see our brochure in pdf format.
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS
THE SHIMMER: Metaphor in the Machine of Words
with KIM ADDONIZIO
William Carlos Williams said, “A poem is a machine made of words.” But there is also something magical in a poem. Metaphor is a part of that magic; it enables the writer to leap beyond the literal. Metaphor can add texture and surprise, and may often be what an entire poem is built on. How can you invite brilliant metaphors into your own work? We’ll study how metaphor functions in various poems, invite it into ours, and use it as a tool for revision. Bring my book ORDINARY GENIUS, and drafts of two-three poems of your own to experiment on. This workshop will be generative with assignments and in-class writing; and critique-based, including discussion of your drafts and revisions.
THE ART OF THE DRAFT: READING THE POEM’S PALM
with CORNELIUS EADY
Reading a poem answers a basic question: what does a poet know, and how, through the act of writing the poem, do they hope to let us, the reader in on it? Through exercises, and close reading of other poets, we will find various ways of answering that question. For our first meeting, please bring copies of a short poem by one of your favorite poets you wish to share. Bring copies of your own poems (maximum 2 pages) to be workshopped.
MOTHER OF MUSES—POETRY AND MEMORY
with CLAUDIA EMERSON
In this critique-based workshop, we will begin by considering the poetry writing process as a function of memory. As we read each other’s poems carefully and closely, offering thoughtful suggestions for making the work better, we’ll strive also to keep the multi-faceted role of memory—personal, shared, cultural, historical—part of our discussion. Please bring copies of two or three poems for distribution and critique.
THREE-DIMENSIONAL POETRY
with DAVID KIRBY
A poem should be as action-packed as an old-school Western movie, which doesn't mean it has to be long; Czeslaw Milosz's "Encounter" is only nine lines, but it contains everything that's needed to break your heart and put it back together again. We'll be looking at examples of poems that blaze" with fire and fury, and we'll do our best to turn up the heat in our own poems as well. You might do well to take a look at the poems in Seriously Funny (see my bio note) in advance. Please bring copies of three poems of your own for distribution.
WORD BY WORD, LINE BY LINE
with THOMAS LUX
We will pay close attention, in minute detail, to all the elements that go into writing a poem. So: we'll do word by word, line by line readings. Frost said that the primary way to get to the reader's heart and mind is through the reader's ear. The sound, the noise of a poem, demands our attention. We must be tough, honest and direct with each other's work and also be generous, thoughtful and never condescending or dismissive. A good workshop can do both. Bring in three or four poems, seventeen copies of each, for discussion.
WRITING FROM YOUR THRESHOLD
with GREGORY ORR
Some of the most engaging poems, for readers and writers, come into being when the poet has positioned himself or herself on the threshold-- that place where the disorder of experience, emotion, or memory meets the primordial ordering powers of poetry. In a series of exercises, we'll work to discover the nature of our own personal threshold and explore the gratifications of writing from that dynamic location. Participants will generate new work and benefit from constructive critique. Participants will send 2 poems in advance of the workshop for review, and I will send advance reading along with a writing assignment to prepare for the work we will accomplish together.
SIDEWAYS AND BACKWARDS: Finding the Poem's Structure
with CHASE TWICHELL
Poetry
workshops often tend to view the poem as a patient in a hospital, with participants acting as a team of distinguished doctors ready to diagnose what ails it. This can be unhelpful and even discouraging to the poet because it fails to take into account how the poem arrived at its current structure, including all the other paths it might have taken (and might still take). I'm interested in how poems discover their internal organization. This course will focus on ways we can go backwards and sideways as we write and revise, thus enabling us to find our way to a workable structure before we begin to polish and perfect a poem's surface. Please bring 2 or 3 unfinished poems for discussion.
NIGHT FISHING IN THE SOUND: Invitations to the Imagination
with ELEANOR WILNER
A poetry workshop exploring ways to get out of the way and invite the imagination--for our own writing as well as to appreciate the work of others. The workshop will be shaped by the poems and approaches of the participants, will involve detailed consideration of each other’s poems, will focus on the resources of craft in the service of meaning, and will present an array of poems for discussion, reflection, and as provocations for fresh discovery. The workshop will be critique based; exercises for writing outside of workshop will be available for those who want them. Please bring copies of 4 poems for distribution and send the poems to me in advance, before December 13, 2011. (Photo credit: Jacques-Jean Tiziou)
MANUSCRIPT CONFERENCE FACULTY
Participants whose tuition is paid-in-full, may schedule a manuscript conference with one of our experienced faculty for a one-on-one session. There is an additional cost of $85 for these conferences, which will be scheduled outside workshop sessions. Manuscripts must be prepared advance of the festival. Conferences will be scheduled on a first come-first served basis.
LAURE-ANNE BOSSELAAR has authored three poetry collections, A New Hunger. (Ausable Press 2007), Small Gods of Grief (Boa Editions 2001), which won the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry, and The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (BOA Editions 1997). Her poems, widely anthologized, have appeared in many journals including Ploughshares, AGNI and the Harvard Review. One of her poems won the National Poetry Contest, sponsored by I.E. magazine. She has edited numerous anthologies. She was born in Belgium and moved to the United States in 1987. Fluent in four languages, she has also published poems in French and Flemish. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, and at the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College.
KURT BROWN is the author of four full collections of poetry: Future Ship (Red Hen Press, 2007); Fables From The Ark, winner of the Custom Words Poetry Prize; More Things in Heaven and Earth (Four Way Books, 2002); and Return of the Prodigals (Four Way Books, 1999). His fifth collection, No Other Paradise, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2010. Brown is editor of several anthologies and author of six chapbooks, most recently: Sincerest Flatteries (Tupelo Press 2007) and Fables from the Ark, which won the Woodland Press Poetry Chapbook Competition. Brown is the founder of the Aspen Writers Conference and teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. He serves on the board of Poet’s House in Manhattan where he lives with his wife, the poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar.
GINGER MURCHISON assisted Thomas Lux in the founding of POETRY at TECH. Her chapbook, Out Here, was published by Jeanne Duval Editions in 2008. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she has published articles, book reviews, and interviews, and her poems have appeared in recent publications of Horticulture, Atlanta Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Terminus Magazine and several anthologies, including Volumes II and III of Java Monkey Speaks: A Poetry Anthology. Editor of the acclaimed Cortland Review, she lives with her husband Clyde Mynatt in Atlanta.
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