The best poetry often doesn’t fit into any stylistic mode, and uses what techniques it needs as it finds them. In this workshop, we’ll discuss your existing poems with supportive frankness. You’ll also generate new work which you’ll submit to daily “kamikaze” revision techniques, and read relevant work by modern and contemporary poets, as we consider—in magpie spirit, embracing confusion as a way to work towards clarity—strategic, formal and thematic questions designed to provide focus but leave choices up to you. In workshopping at least four of your poems over the week (any combination of existing and new; bring four with you to the Festival), with the goal of helping you fail wonderfully to fit in, the most important revision questions will be: “Who are you? Who do you want to be? What do you want your poems to be?”
DAISY FRIED is the author of three books of poetry: Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice (University of Pittsburgh, 2013), named by Library Journal one of the five best poetry books of 2013, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (University of Pittsburgh, 2006), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It, (University of Pittsburgh, 2000), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Award. For her poetry, she’s received Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellowships, as well as a Pushcart Prize and the Cohen Award from Ploughshares. Recent poems have been published in the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, The Threepenny Review and Best American Poetry 2013. She reviews books of poetry for The New York Times, Poetry and the Threepenny Review, and won the Editors Award from Poetry for “Sing, God-Awful Muse,” an essay about reading Paradise Lost and breastfeeding. She is on the faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
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