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.
DAVID BAKER is the author of Swift: New & Selected Poems (Norton 2019), Scavenger Loop (Norton 2015) and Never-Ending Birds, which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. His five books of prose include Show Me Your Environment: Essays on Poetry, Poets, & Poems, and Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry (Graywolf). Among his awards are prizes and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Mellon Foundation, and Poetry Society of America, and others. He holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing at Denison University, teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA program and is Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review.
View poet's page
