The 7th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival took place January 17-22, 2011 at Old School Square in Delray Beach. 2011 Faculty included Stuart Dischell, Jane Hirsfield, Thomas Lux, Heather McHugh, Vijay Seshadri, Alan Shapiro, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and C.D. Wright. Special Guest Reader was former US Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky. The Performance Poets were David Blair and Taylor Mali. Participants from over 30 states, U.K., British Columbia and the Bahamas attended the festival. Two public events sold out, including Robert Pinsky’s reading where he mesmerized the audience as he performed his poems with the Paul Tardiff Jazz Trio. The Festival also sponsored, The Image, Poetry and Photography, an exhibition of photographs inspired by lines from the poems of the featured festival poets.
The 6th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival was held at Old School Square in Delray Beach, Florida, January 18-23, 2010. The poets who taught Advanced Workshops included: Stephen Dobyns, Carolyn Forche, Marie Howe, Thomas Lux, David Wojahn, and Kevin Young. Mary Cornish and Ilya Kaminsky facilitated the Intermediate Workshops. Other Featured Readers were Jay Hopler, Sidney Wade, Andrea Gibson, and Anis Mojgani.
2010 Advanced Workshops
THE POEM’S INTENTION with STEPHEN DOBYNS
ONE POETRY: TOWARD NEW POEMS with CAROLYN FORCHE
WORD BY WORD, LINE BY LINE with THOMAS LUX
TAKING RISKS with JEAN VALENTINE
THE WRITING OF POETRY: ENHANCED TECHNIQUES with DAVID WOJAHN
POEMS OF PRAISE with KEVIN YOUNG
2010 Intermediate Workshops
SEEING AND SAYING/POETRY AND THE VISUAL IMAGE with MARY CORNISH
The 5th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival was held January 19-24, 2009, at the Old School Square Cultural Arts Center in Delray Beach. Faculty poets featured at the 2009 Festival were: Denise Duhamel, Martin Espada, Kimiko Hahn, Laura Kasischke,Thomas Lux, Ann Marie Macari, Gregory Orr, Victoria Redel, and Gerald Stern. Additional guest poets who were featured readers at the festival were: Kelle Groom, Michael Hettich, Taylor Mali, and Lynn Procope.
2009 Advanced Workshops
BARBARIC YAWP with MARTIN ESPADA
RE-VISITING POEMS with KIMIKO HAHN
THE POEM THAT WRITES ITSELF with LAURA KASISCHKE
WORD BY WORD, LINE BY LINE with THOMAS LUX
GOING TO THE NEXT LEVEL with Anne Marie MACARI AND GERALD STERN
The 1st Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival, January 21-23, 2005, was presented at Lynn University, Boca Raton, Florida, in partnership with Poets of the Palm Beaches, Inc. and directed by Miles Coon.
The 2005 workshop faculty included Billy Collins, Thomas Lux, Sharon Olds and Patricia Smith. Additional featured poets included Mary Cornish and Karin deWeille.
Focus on your work in an individual one-hour conference on up to 10 pages of poetry. Applicants may request a conference with workshop application or by direct application on Submittable. Conference Faculty includes: Lorna Knowles Blake, Sally Bliumis-Dunn, Nickole Brown, Jessica Jacobs, and Angela Narciso Torres.
Requests for conferences may be made early, along with applications. Manuscripts are due to faculty for review by December 10th.
“When I fall down the rabbit hole of a poem, I feel like Alice—too big, too small, bewildered, enchanted, curious and crafty.” Lorna Knowles Blake
Focus on your work in an individual one-hour conference on up to 10 pages of poetry. Applicants may request a conference with workshop application or by direct application on Submittable. Conference Faculty includes: Lorna Knowles Blake, Sally Bliumis-Dunn, Nickole Brown, Jessica Jacobs, and Angela Narciso Torres.
Requests for conferences may be made early, along with applications. Manuscripts are due to faculty for review by December 10th.
“I think tension creates a mirror of how our minds often work.” Sally Bliumis-Dunn.
Robert Frost famously said, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” As poets, we know the thrill of being surprised by the direction a draft takes; we may say something we never expected to say. As readers, surprise is often one source of delight, taking us somewhere we didn’t know we were going. How can you invite surprise into your own work? We’ll read and study some poems that successfully surprise in various ways, and read your own drafts to consider how you might revise for not only greater clarity and power, but also for various kinds of surprise. We may do some brief in-class writing or quick revision, so have at hand a piece you’re not very happy with that you’re ready to perform some outpatient surgery on. You should have two poems ready in advance to be workshopped by our group, due a week before the start of the festival; a third poem, based on an assignment, will be due from everyone for our final meeting. Students should email me two poems-in-progress due one week before the workshop (Monday, Jan 3).
The focus of this workshop will be on revision: how can we acquire the tools we need to revise our poems on our own? Many aspiring and even experienced poets find it challenging to revise on their own, without the help of a workshop or mentor. Participants will learn how to strengthen and hone their revision skills—systematically and in depth— and address all the elements of a poem: form, syntax, tone, metaphor, images, line-breaks, opening and closings, to name a few. Each student in this workshop should have twelve 4 x 6 index cards ready for the first workshop meeting.
Participants in this workshop will focus on the transpersonal self as speaker in the poem, a self that deals with states of consciousness beyond the limits of personal identity. Using Walt Whitman’s eleventh canto, Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” Fernando Pessoa’s “The Herdsman,” and Frank Bidart’s “Ellen West,” we will explore a variety of poetic forms as we engage in linear experimentation, fictive intricacy, and lyrical economy. In-class writing exercises will focus on tapping the unconscious for poetic gold.
Early in the “language experiment” he called LEAVES OF GRASS, Walt Whitman enjoins his readers to open the locked doors and unscrew the doors from the jambs. In Whitman’s spirit, this workshop is designed to invite poets to experiment by generating new work and developing drafts in various directions. We’ll read and talk about exemplary contemporary poems. The goal is to work and work, diving deep into what we don’t know how to do yet, seeking insight, complexity and strategies that might lead us, like new roads, to new places. We’ll also devote some of our sessions to discussing work by participants, either poems in progress or fresh out of your notebook.
From Jillian and Mariko Tamaki to Rina Ayuyang to Ebony Flowers, a number of innovative comics and cartooning artists can instruct poets in storytelling and image making. These artists have been known to set in motion beautiful sequences of flashbacks (and flash-forwards) in their work. Just as line breaks expand or alter images in poems, so do panel transitions alter and enrich the narratives of comics with time bending effects. In this generative workshop, we’ll review several instances of time and image manipulation in comics to create new poems, revise poems that may feel “stuck,” and reinvigorate the art of the line break.
In this workshop, we will explore strategies by which poets may enrich their own art by deliberately imitating their favorites… and their favorites’ favorites! We will discuss such topics as voice, influence, and originality, as well as the imperative of serving a serious apprenticeship. How apprentice poets attempt to wipe away traces of influence is our final consideration. That is, to cover their tracks! Participants are asked to bring 2 poems by poets whose work they admire to the first workshop session.
For some, revision can feel like an impossible task. If you look at a poem you wrote two years ago, perhaps you’ll immediately notice some things that need to change. But what if you look at a poem you wrote yesterday? You might feel like a poem is “not done,” but how do you make it better instead of just different? In this class, we’ll consider several approaches to revision, specific and practical strategies one can apply right away to help you revise more confidently, moving forward in ways that can be both bold and effective. The hope is that this process can not only be useful, but also fun and full of discoveries as it leads us toward making poems we hadn’t previously imagined. We’ll spend the first day discussing some of these approaches. For the rest of the week, we’ll workshop poems with these approaches in mind.
We will explore Keats’s notion of Negative Capability as it relates to our capacity for “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” in our poems. We will engage in conversation, reading, generative exercises, and the consideration of your poems, their themes, thesis, and emotional core, with a goal of moving toward work that could be written by no one but you. Defying the easy-out of closure in poems, we will practice and discuss how memory work, music, and imagination can lead us into our most charged enigmatic spaces, while form and narrative coherence can provide focus, support, and artfulness to our poems. We will spend our time together finding our way to the crossroads between lyric intensity and formal compression, negative and positive capability.
Yusef Komunyakaa is our featured Thomas Lux Memorial Poet for the 18th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival. On Tuesday, January 11th, Komunyakaa will sit for a conversation with poet and consummate interviewer, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, who inspires the most original and interesting stories from our special guests. On the evening of Wednesday, January 12th, he will deliver the Thomas Lux Memorial Reading. From Neon Vernacular, his 1994 Pulitzer Prizing winning collection, to his new collection, Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth, New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021, Yusef Komunyakaa’s voice remains a vital presence in the world of poetry.
Located at Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial, Komunyakaa’s famous poem, “Facing It”, allows the reader to reflect not only on the poet’s reckoning with the controversial war, but also to capture the artistic vision of the memorial—that it creates moments of reflection unique to each visitor. In his recent interview with NPR’s Scott Simon, he says, “poetry sort of took hold of me and demanded all of my attention and spirit.” When asked to explain how that feels, he continues,“It feels like one has been chosen as a caretaker of observation. There’s a certain reality, but also there’s a certain kind of dreaming, and that place takes us someplace that we never dreamt of.”
Stay tuned for more information on this great poet and how he will take us somewhere we never dreamt of.
One of the kindest persons and finest poets and teachers of poetry you’ll ever meet, Kwame Dawes will enlighten us all when he delivers the following craft talk at the 2022 Festival
NEWS FROM THE MIDDLE WAY
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years— Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres Trying to use words, and every attempt
Grounded in a close reading of a passage from T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker”, Dawes ekes out hidden and exposed lessons about the life and practice of poetry and art as a poet might encounter it in the peculiar moment in history that we have come upon.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is no stranger to the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She taught workshops here in 2014 and 2018, and next year she returns as the 18thAnnual Festival’s Poet-at-Large. Ideally, the Poet-at-Large visits several schools to share and discuss poetry with hundreds of young people. Since we’ll be virtual again in 2022, Aimee will deliver a remote poetry reading live-streamed into the classrooms of Palm Beach County Schools. On the evening of Saturday , January 15th, she also will present A Reading to Remember to festival participants and the public via Zoom Webinar. Serving as Poet-at-Large places Aimee Nezhukumatathil in the company of other esteemed poets who filled this role: Tyehimba Jess, Patricia Smith, and Brian Turner.
Aimee is an ideal person to interact with young people. With her new book, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks and Other Astonishments, she hopes to inspire readers with awe for the natural world. In an interview with Morning Edition’s Rachel Martin, she says, “I think so much terror, so much hate and fear towards each other and towards other cultures has been from a lack of wonder and imagination.” Aimee tells many stories that support her idea. A mother, a teacher, a woman of color and a brilliant writer, Nezhukumatathil is certain to connect with audiences through her exquisitely crafted words on the topics of cultural nuance and nature’s beauty.
Stay tuned for more information on Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Poet-at-Large, 18thAnnual Palm Beach Poetry Festival. We look forward to filling you with wonder and imagination.
Together we’ll work on your poems inside and out, in our hands-on line-by-line discussion of three poems by each participant. To shape our conversation and study, submit two one-page poems and be ready to write a third poem during the week. Your first poem should be a poem that occurs in a single time and place. The second should be a poem that moves across different times and/or spaces, perhaps mixing or juxtaposing them. The third? That’ll be my surprise. I realize these categories are general or abstract; so don’t worry. All week I’ll add exercises, prompts for writing, and strategies for revision, and I’ll offer plenty of poems as examples—old and contemporary, canonical and surprising. Participants will send 2 new poem drafts by email 10 days in advance of the first workshop.
The focus of this workshop will be on revision: how can we acquire the tools we need to revise our poems on our own? Many aspiring and even experienced poets find it challenging to revise on their own, without the help of a workshop or mentor. Participants will learn how to strengthen and hone their revision skills—systematically and in depth— and address all the elements of a poem: form, syntax, tone, metaphor, images, line-breaks, opening and closings, to name a few. Each student in this workshop should have twelve 4 x 6 index cards ready for the first workshop meeting.
Every writer has their strengths, but we often tend to over-rely on what we already know we do well. In this workshop, we will focus on how to create a balance of tension in poems. We will look at poems that model a balance of tension between clarity and wilderness, narrative and music, emotion and intellect. We will then use exercises to generate new work that tries to balance our inherent strengths by employing vocabulary, syntax, and tonal choices we normally shy away from. We will also workshop some new poems. If you have a natural gift for image and metaphor, what happens when you incorporate philosophy or meditation? If you tend to write simple, declarative sentences, how would your work change if you wrote a poem in a single, long, winding sentence and focused on the musicality of language rather than clarity? Sign up for a tune up.
This workshop will focus on the revision process. We’ll discuss various revision strategies that will help us tighten our poems, but also explore revision as a process that allows us to imagine other possibilities for our work. That’s the true work of revision: to make visible the most interesting and challenging shadows cast by the work. On the first day, we’ll discuss the three pleasures (linguistic, emotional, intellectual) found in literary text. These three pleasures are often employed as a reading strategy, but participants will examine how they can also help us revise and reimagine our work. The workshop will be critique-based; each participant will have work discussed at least four times. At the end of each workshop, I’ll give a writing prompt to help you generate new work during the conference. Two weeks before the conference begins, each participant will email the 4 poems they intend to workshop to all the participants. This will give everyone time to read and to annotate the work. I’ll email reading materials and a workshop schedule before our first meeting.
In this workshop we will explore how poems need not end with an ascendant or descendent gesture to be as haunting and powerful as a poem that affirms the human condition and assures us that we will rise above all of its circumstances. This workshop is based on a series of lectures on inspirational poetry, sometimes called the poetry of agreements; and literary poetry, sometimes referred to as the poetry of dislocation. We will discuss where these types of poetries intersect, but also where they differ in their aims and how we may use various types of closure to free ourselves from received (and often gendered) uninterrogated beliefs around positivity in our efforts to write resonant, impactful work.
All poetry is conventional and all convention exists in public spaces and in history. This workshop will take these truths to be fundamental to free verse poetry and, drawing from them, will examine the various ways poetic conventions might be considered by poets practicing what is, ultimately, a public art. (Critic Harry Levin has noted, “A private convention, like a prefabricated myth, is a contradiction in terms.”) We will discuss what constitutes a line of free verse poetry, the many ways groups of free verse lines can be in communication with each other (and with you), what silence and interiority have to do with free verse poetry, and what (exactly?) is free about free verse. And much more. Each class will begin with a close examination of a classic free verse poem. From there, we will workshop poems by students in the class, always asking ourselves how these poems inhabit convention, how they speak to us, and what they say. Each student will turn in two free verse poems for workshop a week ahead of the first day of class. The instructor will also offer a schedule for workshopping poems ahead of the first meeting. Outside readings will be provided ahead of time.
Participants will discuss how the poet is handling content – the decisions that have been made in terms of diction, form, pacing, syntax, etc. with a mind to coming up with useful ideas for revision. We will also see– and this is important—if the poem can travel down another path that has not yet occurred to the writer. In other words, we’ll look at the poem both in terms of its intent and we’ll mine the material of the poem to see if there are other possibilities for it that are of interest to the writer. There will be prompts and in-class writing as well as close readings of poems from provided handouts. I will also provide suggestions / exercises for you on your own time (optional). In short, while the work will be about the poems that we see on the page, it will also be about the possibility of discovering the poem(s) within our poems. We will be busy! Depending on the size of the group, we will look at no less than 3 poems by each participant during our week together to be emailed in advance of the workshop.
NOTES FOR ORGANIZATION: Poems will be emailed to me and to the group between 7-10 days in advance of the workshop. Make sure that your name is on each poem. One-page poems are preferable in 12-point font but we will accommodate two pages per poem, of course. Instructions as to which emails to send to will be forthcoming closer to the conference. You may want to print out workshop poems in advance although we may screen share poems on Zoom as well. Handouts will be emailed to each participant 7-10 days in advance of our gathering.
Requests for conferences may be made early, along with applications. Manuscripts are due to faculty for review by December 10th.
“Writing is one of the most intimate acts of creative art there is, and while revision requires a firm grip on craft, it’s often soul work.” Nickole Brown
In this generative workshop, we will be writing and revising poems of delight, celebration, and grief, paying special attention to tone of voice. Tone is often defined as an author’s attitude toward her subject, but tone is also content. It is the implicit invitation to feel with the author, to enter the head and heart of the poet to see how and what he sees. What exactly makes a poem express gladness or sorrow? How does imagery, for example, affect tone—or diction? By comparing a variety of odes, aubades, and elegies, we will explore the various elements that establish and sustain tone of voice. This will allow each of us to enter our own work with a clearer sense of what is required to say the things essential to a reader’s full understanding.
Focus on your work in an individual one-hour conference on up to 10 pages of poetry. Applicantsmay request a conference with workshop application or by direct application on Submittable. Conference Faculty includes: Lorna Knowles Blake, Sally Bliumis-Dunn, Nickole Brown, Jessica Jacobs, and Angela Narciso Torres.
Requests for conferences may be made early, along with applications. Manuscripts are due to faculty for review by December 10th.
“Poetry makes meaning out of the inexplicable, unearthing and recreating what would not normally be accessible.” Angela Narciso Torres
Appointments will be confirmed upon acceptance to a workshop, first-come-first served. Requests for conferences may be made early, along with applications and will be accepted until November 15, 2021. Manuscripts are due to faculty for review by December 10th. The cost is $120, payable upon confirmation. A great opportunity!
Conferences are available to accepted participants and auditors with their application, but also to the general public via Submittable.
This year’s Thomas Lux Memorial Reading and Special Interview Event will feature a one-on-one interview of Gregory Orr by Laure-Anne Bosselaar to be followed by a Q&A session with the poet on Tuesday, January 19, at 4:00 pm
The Thomas Lux Memorial Reading Event, The Beloved: A Poetry and Song Cycle is a collaborative work created by Gregory Orr and The Parkington Sisters. This original work features the extraordinary musical compositions and lyric adaptation of Gregory Orr’s poems by the Parkington Sisters and sequenced with Gregory Orr’s reading and performance. Don’t miss this!
Descriptions of 2021 Poet-at-Large Brian Turner’s virtual high school performances and a special evening event with this distinguished poet are forthcoming.
This workshop will emphasize sound in poetry: pauses, silences, nonsense words, ordinary speech. After you finish this workshop, and without sacrificing sense, you will be able to incorporate into your poems effects ranging from sonic beauty to outright noise. The result will be a more audible and dynamic poem that will positively spring from the page. The daily sessions will consist of prompts, basic technical instruction, and critiques, so please bring copies of at least two poems of any sort to share with your peers. Together we’ll work on your old poems and inspire you to write new ones.
Many poets find it challenging to revise their work without the help of a workshop group or mentor. This inter-active workshop will focus on how can we acquire the tools we need to revise poems on our own. We’ll work on strengthening those new skills which will — systematically and in depth — address all the elements of a poem: form, syntax, tone, metaphor, line-breaks, etc. This interactive workshop will be fun, so do bring your sense of humor. Also bring 3 poems (no more than 1 page in 12pt font) that you feel are “stuck.” I will give prompts for those who prefer to work on new poems. Important: Please bring twenty 5 x 8 index cards.
If we are all telling the same stories of love, sex, and death, how can we sidestep cliché? With a trifecta of close readings of contemporary poems, practical lessons designed to deepen your understanding of craft (and how you can put those tips to real use), and a multitude of generative exercises to get you writing in and out of class, you will refresh your senses through a deep practice of awareness in order to see—and write—anew. These two workshop leaders—with complementary but unique approaches to entering and revising poems—make for a dynamic, challenging intensive that welcomes those willing to take chances, play, and push their work. Intended for writers of all levels, this course will strengthen your poems by helping them sing with the texture of the well-observed world. Participants will bring 2 poems and will have the option of workshopping those or new poems.
Save the dates! January 20-25, 2020 in Delray Beach. Complete details coming soon!
In his famous early poem, “Digging,” Seamus Heaney says that to write poems he’ll “dig,” as a farmer does, in the earth of life and language with a pen. In this workshop we’ll work on two levels. Where are the roots of the poem? What’s underneath what we can see of the poem in its current version? We’ll work with the earth and water that a poem is made of–language, craft, memory, feeling, thought, experience, awareness. And also: how does line-by-line craft produce the poem’s structure? For each poet we’ll work together in a process of discovery, and we’ll also see that the structure of a poem is in how and where it moves. Bring three poems with you (from 12 to 20 lines each; copies for everyone) and also send them to me at least two weeks before the Festival.
Save the dates! January 20-25, 2020 in Delray Beach. Complete details coming soon!
Donald Hall once wrote: “Poetry . . . wants to address the whole matter of the human—including fact and logic, but also the body with its senses, and above all the harsh complexities of emotion.” This generative and rigorous workshop is designed for those interested in investing their poems with the complexity of their intellect but also their emotional truths. Together, we will seek the poetic forms, luminous language, and attitude by which to amplify what we find most important to say, what is radiant and authentic about our journey on earth.
Save the dates! January 20-25, 2020 in Delray Beach.
In this workshop, we will talk about poems from around the world and also discuss your own work. Everyone will receive a line-by-line reading of their poetry. The details, images and sounds, the aspects of line, linebreak, metaphor, and others tools of our craft will be discussed in depth. The focus here is on you: how can your work grow, develop. What tools of poetic craft might best fit your voice? The students should bring 17 copies of one of their poems to the first class meeting.
“Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation,” writes poet Wallace Stevens. In this workshop, we will explore how to “make sense” of poetry’s relationship to the unconscious and the use we can make of this relationship for poetic composition and revision. We will discuss the notion of associative logic, look at poems by poets such as Charles Simic, Tomaz Salamun, Brenda Hillman, and Gertrude Stein. Before the festival begins, we will embark on a two-part poetry exercise that engages the unconscious, and workshop our visions once we convene together. Each participant will also submit two poems (no more than five pages total) for group critique: you are encouraged to submit, for at least one of them, a messy, half-baked poem!
Save the dates! January 20-25, 2020 in Delray Beach.
The word persona comes from the Latin term for mask. A number of American poets—Ai, Rita Dove, Andrew Hudgins, Tyehimba Jess, Natasha Trethewey, and Kevin Young—have adopted linguistic masks to create new and complicated narratives. This workshop will consider the possibilities and implications of contemporary persona poetry and what it takes to render the poetic mask in a textured and considerate way. How do we negotiate those spaces that aren’t from our experience? What kinds of opportunities and permissions does writing in persona offer us? How can we write in persona with ethical and creative clarity? Participants will write new monologues based on prompts each day in an effort to create a fully realized persona by the end of the week. Persona projects in progress may be used to begin generating monologues.
Save the dates! January 20-25, 2020 in Delray Beach.
In this generative workshop we’ll consider the craft decisions we make in free-verse poems: How are the elements of the poem working on their own? How do they work with—or against—each other? How might form enact—or reveal—content? We’ll discuss a wide variety of contemporary model poems, paying special attention to how line, syntax, and stanza can communicate meaning, and we will use those model poems as prompts for poems to be written before the next day’s workshop session. As we discuss participants’ poems over the course of the week, we’ll build creative momentum and develop new strategies to carry participants forward in their writing practice. Participants may bring one free-verse poem to workshop during the week, but are not required to do so.
Save the dates! January 20-25, 2020 in Delray Beach.
The festival welcomes Joy Harjo to the festival as our Special Guest. She will be interviewed with Laure-Anne Bosselaar and will deliver the annual Thomas Lux Memorial Reading following the festival gala. We congratulate her on being named the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate in June 2019.
The festival Poet At Large will appear for a special evening reading on Friday, January 24th, and also present to high school students throughout Palm Beach County during festival week. This year’s Poet At Large is Patricia Smith. We anticipate that this program will reach one of the largest festival audiences in our history. It is an honor to welcome Patricia Smith to the festival in this new role to reach an important festival audience including teachers and students beyond the walls of the Crest Theatre.
This workshop will consider the conscious and unconscious choices writers face regarding the structures and strategies of their poems. We will look closely at the way poems are made and organized and the manners in which their crafting affects the sense they make. The pace will be fast moving, the atmosphere lively, critical, helpful, supportive, and sometimes humorous. Bring 3 of your poems plus a poem you admire that accomplishes something you want to do in your own work, 17 copies of each.
Many poets find it challenging to revise their work without the help of a workshop group or mentor. This inter-active workshop will focus on how can we acquire the tools we need to revise poems on our own. We’ll work on strengthening those new skills which will — systematically and in depth — address all the elements of a poem: form, syntax, tone, metaphor, line-breaks, etc. This interactive workshop will be fun, so do bring your sense of humor. Also bring 3 poems (no more than 1 page in 12pt font) that you feel are “stuck.” I will give prompts for those who prefer to work on new poems. Important: Please bring twenty 5 x 8 index cards.
“Imitation, conscious imitation, is one of the great methods, perhaps the method of learning to write,” said Theodore Roethke. In this workshop we’ll consider a variety of contemporary poems that demonstrate specific aspects of the craft. Then we’ll make our own poems that build upon the past to create something fresh. Each day we’ll study a particular element of the craft, write new poems, and share our work. Please bring to workshop one or two poems you admire that utilize strategies that intrigue you, and also a poem of your own that you want to revise. Expect to leave with work that’s more authentic, courageous, and consciously crafted than you’ve ever written before.
Appointments will be confirmed upon acceptance to a workshop, first-come-first served. Requests for conferences may be made early, along with applications and will be accepted until December 1, 2021. Manuscripts are due to faculty for review by December 10th. The cost is $120, payable upon confirmation. A great opportunity!
Conferences are available to accepted participants and auditors with their application, but also to the general public via Submittable.
May 22, 2022 – Palm Beach — It is with deep sadness that we report that Festival Founder & President, Miles Coon, passed away peacefully on Saturday, May 21, 2022 in Palm Beach. He leaves ... Read more >
We are pleased to announce that the festival has created a Guestbook! We invite all past participants, faculty, interns and friends of the festival to share memories of past festivals or their recent poetry news ... Read more >
May 20, 2022 — The Festival Archive contains descriptions and images from past festivals has been updated in May 2022. The archive includes descriptions by year of each of the eighteen festivals that began ... Read more >
The Palm Beach Poetry Festival is presented in partnership with Old School Square and is generously sponsored by Art Works of the National Endowment for the Arts, Morgan Stanley, The Legacy Group of Atlanta, GA, ... Read more >
Every year we work to bring poetry, in its every aspect, to our audiences, and fill a whole week with poetry events that feature America’s most extraordinary poets–at the festival. As we celebrate 18 years ... Read more >
The Palm Beach Poetry Festival believes in nurturing the creativity of the community’s young writers. Listening to their voices could not come at a better time for all of us. We have published their winning ... Read more >
The Palm Beach Poetry Festival is pleased to announce the 2022 fellowships and scholarships for the 18th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Fellowships included the Langston Hughes Fellowships for African-American Poets; Kundiman Fellowships for Asian-American ... Read more >
We would like to collect information during your visit to help us better understand site use. This data is anonymized, and will not be used for marketing purposes. Read More on our Privacy Policy page. You can withdraw permission at any time or update your privacy settings here. Please choose below to continue.
Every writer has their strengths, but we often tend to over-rely on what we already know we do well. In this workshop, we will focus on how to create a balance of tension in poems. We will look at poems that model a balance of tension between clarity and wilderness, narrative and music, emotion and intellect. We will then use exercises to generate new work that tries to balance our inherent strengths by employing vocabulary, syntax, and tonal choices we normally shy away from. We will also workshop some new poems. If you have a natural gift for image and metaphor, what happens when you incorporate philosophy or meditation? If you tend to write simple, declarative sentences, how would your work change if you wrote a poem in a single, long, winding sentence and focused on the musicality of language rather than clarity? Sign up for a tune up.
In this generative workshop, we will be writing and revising poems of delight, celebration, and grief, paying special attention to tone of voice. Tone is often defined as an author’s attitude toward her subject, but tone is also content. It is the implicit invitation to feel with the author, to enter the head and heart of the poet to see how and what he sees. What exactly makes a poem express gladness or sorrow? How does imagery, for example, affect tone—or diction? By comparing a variety of odes, aubades, and elegies, we will explore the various elements that establish and sustain tone of voice. This will allow each of us to enter our own work with a clearer sense of what is required to say the things essential to a reader’s full understanding.
Additional focus on your work is available in individual one-hour conferences on up to 10 pages of poetry. Conference Faculty: 
The festival welcomes Joy Harjo to the festival as our Special Guest. She will be interviewed with Laure-Anne Bosselaar and will deliver the annual Thomas Lux Memorial Reading following the festival gala. We congratulate her on being named the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate in June 2019.
