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Workshop Descriptions & Instructors
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Scrubbing the Engine: Craft and Repair Workshop for Poets “A Stretchy Sense of ‘I’”: Dramatic Perspective in Poetry Riding the Horse Backwards: A Writing Intensive for Poets Scrubbing the Engine: Craft and Repair Workshop for Poets In this workshop and revision class, we’ll be following the idea that poetry (as William Carlos Williams said) is “a small machine made of words,” suggesting that while language is probably our most important tool, there are also gears and moving parts. This class is designed to help you recognize the mechanisms in your own brilliant machine and give you a few useful tools for easy maintenance and repair. We’ll consider image, line breaks, metaphor, syntax, diction and form. If we think of these elements as tools we use to build our poems, how might we learn to be more skilled with them? How can we invite them into our creative process? How can we use them in approaching revision? These are a few of the questions we’ll be asking. This class is designed for poets who have had some experience with workshop critique and are interested in deepening their relationship to craft. Participants will be asked to submit five pages of work in advance of the workshop. Plan to bring three additional pages to the workshop for extensive feedback. “A Stretchy Sense of ‘I’”: Dramatic Perspective in Poetry In this intensive workshop, we’ll explore the idea of perspective in poems, discussing the strategies involved in persona poems, dramatic monologues, historical narratives, and post-modern techniques of multi-voiced poems. All of these serve to create in our work what Brenda Hillman refers to as a “stretchy sense of I.” Through reading and writing exercises, we’ll ask questions about our choice of perspective: Who’s talking and why? How do we arrive at perspective in poems? How can we deepen our autobiographical material through the use of these techniques? What can shifting perspectives offer to the drama of our work? We’ll read work by Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Dan Beachy-Quick, Ai, Tyehimba Jess, Lucie Brock-Broido and others. This is a largely generative class, designed for students with some previous experience who are looking to deepen their own understanding of their craft. Riding the Horse Backwards: A Writing Intensive for Poets In this course, we will focus on a variety of writing exercises designed to free the subconscious and sense of play in the writing process. We will experiment with dreams, free association, chance principles and other methods to generate new work. This workshop is designed for experienced writers who are interested in finding new methods of generating poems and will help those who are overwhelmed, stalled or lost in their writing practice. We will share work with each other each session, but will not be formally critiquing poems. We will also read some work by other poets, including Dean Young, Bob Hickock, Mary Ruefle, Louise Glück, William Stafford and others, but most of our time together will be spent writing. The aim is to encourage you to go beyond your normal writing process. Bring paper, pen and a playful attitude. Biography
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by Instructor Sponsored by the Division of Continuing Education Last updated on February 10, 2009 |
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