New Thresholds, New Anatomies! With Tom Sleigh

tomsleighHow do the kinds of sentences you write open up new areas of experience? What is and isn’t your material? How is that material linked to your idea of yourself as a poet, and what you will or won’t allow yourself to say? By using four exemplary poets as a springboard, this workshop will give you new approaches to process and language, syntax and line, description and figuration, music and voice, as well as encouraging you to face into new areas of experience that will keep you going once this workshop is over. We’ll use imitation as a way to originate new work. Bring three poems in progress, (17 copies), though we’ll also look at work you produce during the workshop. (New thresholds, new anatomies! —Hart Crane)

I remember a friend who wanted to shake up his life in the hope of shaking up his work. He kept quoting Rilke: “You must change your life.” When I told another friend, he said, “He doesn’t need to change his life. He just needs to change his line length.”