POWERS OF THE STRANGE + PARTICULAR with ARACELIS GIRMAY

In this workshop we will consider the ways that reading or writing a poem might be an act of resuscitation. An awakening of one’s “sight,” mind and questions. We will read the work of writers whose texts are original, strange, wondering, and will consider the powers of such elements (and here I am hearing Paul Celan in “The Meridian” translated by Pierre Joris: “The poem estranges. It estranges by its existence, by the mode of its existence, it stands opposite and against one, voiceful and voiceless simultaneously, as language, as language setting itself free…” Participants: please come ready to read, experiment, write. Each participant should bring a copy of a meaningful, mysterious, powerful/potent, resonant photo from their personal album or archive.

STRATEGIES OF ASTONISHMENT with MATTHEW OLZMANN

How does a poem surprise its readers? How does a shift in direction cause a poem to resonate in an evocative manner? How do we move beyond our initial subject matter to produce unexpected revelations? This workshop will look at how these effects are shaped through a series of deliberate craft choices. We’ll focus on how each line creates a set of expectations which following lines will intensify or overthrow. Poets should bring three poems of their own to work on. We’ll also write new poems over the week. The goal—whether revising poems or generating new work—will be to develop some new skills to sustain us after the workshop is over. We’ll startle ourselves as often as possible.

BUILDING POEMS FROM THE GROUND UP with CAMPBELL MCGRATH

Poetry is often accused of being a flighty and ephemeral art, but even the most impalpable of materials can yield dynamic poems when we ground them in the real world. Language is rooted in the tongue, emotions stab at the heart, memories flash across an ultravivid movie screen in the mind. This workshop will provide a blueprint for building poems from those essential elements using concrete images, well-engineered syntax, and deftly-hewn lines. Bring a poem in process to the first class, with copies for the group; thereafter we will write new poems and workshop them day by day. Over the course of the week we will generate new work, consider strategies for revision, and depart Delray Beach with better poetic skills (and better tans) than when we arrived.

THROW YOUR VOICE: HOW TO CRAFT A PRESENCE ON THE PAGE with GREGORY PARDLO

Voice partakes of a dynamic conversation across history, languages, cultures, and traditions. Yet few notions in poetry today prove as lively, elusive, and contested as voice. Whether we think of voice as a metaphor for identity and personal style, or as the root material of poems, or as a barometer of moral and cultural authority, we rarely consider how these aspects come together in a single poem. There is nothing neutral or transparent about the voice of any poem. What do our voices say about us, and how much license should we claim in shaping them? In this workshop we will write new poems that explore these exciting and contrary facets of voice.

THE POEM’S SKELETON with CHASE TWICHELL

Why do some poems seem to arrive on the page with a life of their own, while others refuse to breathe no matter how much we revise them? Often the answer lies in the relationship between the elements of craft (imagery, diction, tone, music, etc.) and the poem’s internal organization, or structure. In this workshop we’ll put on our x-ray glasses and look closely at how a poem’s skeleton can be simple or complex, coherent or incoherent, and how the right structure can streamline and clarify the work of revision. Although the workshop will center on discussion of your poems, we’ll also do some exercises and experiments. Please bring 3 unfinished poems, no more than a page each.

 

INVOKING THE MUSE with ELEANOR WILNER

Photo Jacques-Jean Tiziou

How to get out of the way, invite the imagination, and surprise yourself. Our workshop will be looking for ways to invite a power that won’t be commanded, to improve our poetic luck, change our eyes, go from sight to insight. We’ll do close readings of each other’s poems, taking the poems on their own terms, and asking what strategies and techniques help us see what we didn’t already know. The workshop is for people, like me, addicted to an art of play and discovery whose outcome is ultimately (and luckily) beyond our control. Participants are asked to send one favorite poem by someone else, and 4 poems of your own in advance, looking especially for poems that surprised you.

 

 

2019 Poet At Large: Tyehimba Jess

For the first time, the festival will feature a Poet At Large. The role of the Poet At Large will be to appear for a special evening reading on Friday, January 25th, as well as to present to high school students throughout Palm Beach Country during festival week. This year’s Poet At Large is Tyehimba Jess, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book, Olio. We anticipate that this program will reach one of the largest festival audiences in our history. It is an honor to welcome Tyehimba Jess who brings poetry and history alive for us through a nationally and internationally recognized achievement in his most recent book, Olio.

2019 Special Guest, Sharon Olds

The festival welcomes Sharon Olds who returns to the festival as our Special Guest and to deliver the annual Thomas Lux Memorial Reading.

TWELVE STEPS TOWARD REVISION with LAURE-ANNE BOSSELAAR

This very interactive workshop focuses on how to strengthen and hone your revision skills by systematically and individually addressing all the elements of a poem including structure, tone, line-breaks, form, syntax, sounds, and more. I will also give prompts or exercises to do during the week or later at home.  Mostly, this workshop should be inspiring, motivating and fun – so bring your sense of humor, imagination and three poems that need work.  Please also bring a poem, not written by you, that you particularly love.

Please bring fifteen 5 x 8 index cards & 17 copies of your poems.

 

POEMS FOR THE FIRST AND LAST DAY OF THE WORLD with GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI

A GENERATIVE AND CONTEMPLATIVE JOURNEY

Rilke tells us we must change our lives but what the heck does that mean? How can our poems help us meet the great mystery of what comes next? We will look at and write poems that engage, welcome, and resist moments of great change. In a mix of reading and writing, the workshop will function like a lab. Experimenting with form and structure, we’ll work to generate enough poems and exercises to take you through at least a season of adventure and possibility. We will think about how poetry, our own and others, might help us find our way in seemingly inexplicable times. We will workshop at least one poem you write during the week and talk deeply about how to make variations of poems that can lead both to deep revision and entirely new poems.

 

 

THE TRANSPERSONAL SELF with CHARD DENIORD

This workshop will focus on reading and writing poems whose speakers place another before them, and then make charged figurative connections to what Walt Whitman called “the other I am.” We will read each other’s poems line by line, examining line breaks, poetic strategy, form, intention, imagery, tropes, verbal music, and what John Keats described as “negative capability,” the ability to “exist in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Participants will bring 4 poems to the workshop with our goal to workshop at least 3 during the week. In addition to writing poems with transpersonal speakers, we will also write several persona poems as class exercises.

 

SOUND, SYNTAX, STANZA, MAGIC, NUTS AND BOLTS with BETH ANN FENNELLY

This intensive, interactive workshop will combine craft classes with generative prompts, in-class writing, and workshopping. Our goal will be to leave our time together with four new drafts, one of which will be workshopped, and four poems written prior to the festival being brought to the table. Day 1: Four Ways Poets Can Use Sound to Make Meaning; Assignment: Sound Poem, Workshop. Day 2: Syntax and Diction. Assignment: Syntax Poem, Workshop. Day 3: The Line, the Stanza, the Page. Assignment:, Kinesology Poem, Workshop. Day 4: The Magic of Metaphor, Assignment: Metaphor Poem, Workshop. Day 5: Nuts and Bolts. Workshop and Discussion of Revision, Publication, and What Comes Next. Workshop draft of poem generated from a class writing prompt.

MYSTERY BEFORE MASTERY with ROSS GAY

This workshop takes as its central premise that the making of interesting poems requires an engagement with and a pursuit of what the poet does not know.  But how do we pursue what we don’t know?  How do we make things out of un-knowing?  We will be looking at a number of texts that seem to ask this very question, using them as (unfixed) models, as questions for how we might make beautiful, puzzling things.  All participants should bring three poems of their own that puzzle them.  And be prepared to experiment.

 

REALPOETICS with RODNEY JONES

This workshop will focus on language fueled by necessity and the intention to  characterize what is genuine. In critiques we will study how each poem sounds, its individual noise and music. Does it speak to us? What precision, passion, and original behavior  qualify it as singular?  In critiques, participants should be forthright, but never neglect great stuff, and never settle for consensus. We are here to encourage and to have serious fun. Aside from close critiques, each class will feature readings, writing exercises, and discussions of individual process, revision, flow, and poem generation.  Participants should submit 4-7 poems in advance and bring copies to the first class.  I welcome experimentation, poems that take aesthetic and moral risks, but, also, poems that seek formal mastery.

VOICE & VISION with PHILLIS LEVIN

Photo by Sigrid Estrada

What gives texture, momentum, and character to a poem? Together we focus on drafting and revising new work while exploring key elements of the craft: dynamics of lineation, the power of syntax, realms of the stanza, the drama of rhetorical form. We consider each poem as an ecosystem and critique all work in that light. Most of class time is spent discussing your own poems, forces at play within: rhythm, diction, image, figure, tone. We begin each day’s workshop by reading several touchstone poems whose strategies, when internalized, spur stylistic development and open unforeseen ways of sounding/shaping/re-envisioning what you compose.

Participants are welcome to send poems in advance of the workshop for review: 3-4 typed poems (up to five pages total, with no more than one poem per page) before December 15, 2017.

 

MAKING POEMS THAT SNAP, CRACKLE, AND POP with AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL

Building upon Audre Lorde’s idea that “the sharing of joy…forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference,” we will spend our time in workshop generating poems that sing and celebrate the various big and small delights of this earth. We will also discuss each other’s poems in workshop and each day learn a new poetic practice to help keep you generating new work long after you return home. Come prepared to roll up your sleeves and dig in!

Submit 1 poem for workshop via email no later than January 8, 2018. 

DEJA-VERSE with TIM SEIBLES

Often, after writing a poem, we become a bit intoxicated by it.  Our emotional investment in the developing drafts may blind us to the flaws and greater possibilities of what we have begun.  This workshop will focus on revision, on the seeing again of poems.  The goal is to sharpen our sense of works in progress, so that we might compose pieces that fully engage our audience. Everything is in play as a poem takes shape: subject, imagery, lineation, tone, duration, diction, and more.  Each of these facets affects what and how a poem does what it does. With closer scrutiny, we can maximize the power of our choices.  Participants should bring 2-3 poems to examine and revise.

POETRY INSIDE OUT with DAVID BAKER

Together we’ll work on your poems inside and out in hands-on, line by line discussion of at least three poems from each participant. To shape our conversation and study, bring three relatively short poems-in-progress: a confessional or autobiographical poem; an erotic, social, collective, or political poem; a nature poem.  One focused on self, one about “the other” or others, and one whose concern is less with people and more with nature or a natural entity.  The categories are general, so don’t worry. During the week I’ll add exercises, prompts for writing and strategies for revision, and bring poems as examples—old and contemporary, canonical and surprising.

WAIT… LET ME REPHRASE THIS with LAURE-ANNE BOSSELAAR

This very inter-active workshop will focus on revision and techniques: how can we acquire the tools we need to revise poems on our own? Many aspiring and even experienced poets find it challenging to revise their work without the help of a workshop group or mentor. Participants will learn how to strengthen and sharpen their revision skills which will — systematically and in depth — address the craft elements of a poem: form, syntax, tone, metaphor, images, line-breaks, titles, closure, etc. I will also offer prompts and exercises. Please bring three poems of yours that need help, that you feel are ’stuck’, and don’t work (yet!), a poem you wrote that you are proud of, and one of your favorite poems written by another poet (famous, unknown, published in book-form or not).  Bring 17 copies of everything.

THE SENSUAL FORM with TINA CHANG

Tina-Chang2This workshop is intended for writers who are interested in sensual detail (relating to or drawing from the five senses) with the understanding that poetry cannot exist without spirit, soul, shadow, duende, intuition. During first half of the class we practice traditional forms such as the sonnet, ghazal, pantoum and during the second half of the class we will move toward modernized and invented forms: the contemporary zuihitsu, erasure, and hybrid forms combining poetry and visual art, all the while moving toward your own individualized form(s). During our discussions we will explore poetic devices, formal strategies, structure, rhythm, and sound. Students are asked to write and read consistently, experiment, and be passionate about creation.

OBSESSIONAL POETICS: NO ONE WRITES JUST ONE POEM with LYNN EMANUEL

Lynn Emanuel by Heather Kresge COLORIn this workshop, we will focus on clusters of poems. We will examine the ways, consciously or not, our poems return to a place, person, image, word, line/sentence construction, or a form of expression. What can these repetitions teach us about our poems? How can we mine these repetitions, these obsessions, for new work? How might we subvert or delve more deeply into our own habits? Rather than looking at numerous single poems each meeting, we will look at a fewer number of poem clusters and spend a longer period of time on each. Participants will send 4-5 poems in advance of the workshop. There will be prompts and some handouts to inspire you to write new work during the week.

 

WRITING POEMS THAT DON’T FIT with DAISY FRIED

FriedDaisy2The 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?”

NEW SHADOWS: READING TO WRITE with TERRANCE HAYES

This workshop will offer concrete strategies for writing when the only teacher available is a book. We will explore the ways “reading to write” can result in new poems. During the week we will look at how an assortment of poems “shadow,” imitate, and are in conversation with other poems and other forms (music, film, journalism). Most importantly, inventive imitations and transformations will be generated in response to the reading. Come prepared to generate and share work written in class. In workshops poems will be discussed not for their merit as imitations, but for their originality and potential. No advance submission is necessary.

 

THE POET’S CRAFT: USING WHAT’S AT HAND with DORIANNE LAUX

Laux-colorThis primarily generative workshop will use selected poems by this year’s festival faculty and special guest poet as inspiration, models, and guides for our own writing. What we have at hand (in person!) during the festival week is already inspiring. This workshop will go further. We will look closely at each poem to divine craft elements such as structure and strategy, diction and rhythm, sound and pattern, subject and style. Bring a notepad, journal or laptop and be prepared to come away with some freshly minted drafts.  In addition, please send to me, in advance, two of your existing poems, still in need of work, for discussion in class as time permits. Bring 17 copies of each to the workshop.

 

MAKING POEMS FROM THE WAY POEMS WORK with CARL PHILLIPS

Phillips_Carl2A poem is not a car, but looking under a poem’s hood can be useful. Looking at five to six techniques as employed in the poems I’ll distribute during the week, we will use those techniques both as ways to generate new poems of our own, and as a way to revitalize and re-see drafts of poems-in-progress. By week’s end, we will have brought those poems-in-progress to completion or close to, and we will leave with new work, either finished or ready for revision. A handout of reading will be provided by the instructor at the first session. Please bring 17 copies of three poems-in-progress that you would like to work on for the week.

 

 

ESTABLISHING, SUSTAINING & SHIFTING POETIC TONE: REVISION with MARTHA RHODES

Martha-Rhodes-largeThis workshop will focus on how we establish, sustain and shift tone in our poems. We will look at each poem presented with an eye toward diction, punctuation, line, stanza, pacing, etc. and how these craft elements influence the realization of our poems. We will also look at handouts of poems during our week together and there will be some in-class writing.  Participants will submit 5 poems not to exceed 10 pages total by email in a single word document, in advance of the workshop by December 20th at the latest. We may not discuss all five poems but you will be able to make a choice during the week.

REVISION: OPPORTUNITY FOR DISCOVERY AND SURPRISE with ALAN SHAPIRO

alan_shapiroAll writing is revision. And all revision is or ought to be an opportunity for discovery and surprise. To flourish as a poet, you need to cultivate a love for play, a willingness to go against the grain of what you know and like, of everything you’ve maybe learned to do too well. But how do you break habits of composition? How do you follow this or that suggestion without betraying your original impulse? Since I take it as axiomatic that all poems are inexhaustibly revisable, at what point do you say, enough already, and stop fiddling, despite imperfections you can’t eliminate? These are some of the questions we will consider as we examine each other’s work over the course of the week. I will bring examples of work by other poets, but the majority of class time will be focused on the work you submit for class discussion. Bring 4 poems, 17 copies of each, to our first meeting.

PATRICIA SMITH WORKSHOP

In a generative workshop designed to elicit discomfort, we will stretch the boundaries of the ordinary and predictable by searching for unexpected entry points into our work. We will go beyond discomfort and write through the walls that seek to suppress the possibilities of our poems. The workshop time will be divided between critique of existing poems and the crafting of new work. Handouts of poems that address craft and inspire us will be distributed and reviewed each day. Participants will bring four poems (17 copies each) to the first meeting, understanding all four may not be addressed directly in class.

POETIC ‘YIELD’ with LINDA GREGERSON

FacWeb-GregersonWhen does it become a poem? What can you do when it floats on the surface and stalls? What’s the difference between the almost-passable look-alike and the real, the un-fake-able, thing? If we enter the poem to be changed, to discover connections or depths we could not have plotted beforehand, what place does that leave for craft and deliberation? How can we “plan” to be surprised? We’ll look together at a number of contemporary poems that, using contrasting methods and materials, successfully practice the art of discovery; and we’ll experiment with varied compositional strategies that seek to maximize our own poetic “yield.” By way of introducing yourselves, please bring two poems-in-progress to the first day of workshop. For the rest of the conference, we’ll be dividing our time between these poems and the new ones you write in response to prompts. I think you’ll be surprised, not only at the sheer amount of new work you’ll generate in six short days, but at your own limberness in the multiple techniques of discovery-on-the-page.

NAMING THE NAMELESS with BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY

FacWeb-ShaughnessyMost of life’s experiences transcend or defy explanation, yet it is often precisely that which is confounding, mysterious, elusive, or fleeting we feel called (or pulled) to write about.  “Poetry exists to give name to the nameless.” (Audre Lorde.) A poem functions as a work of art that translates the ineffable into language—heightened or familiar—that comes as close as possible to lived experience.  We’ll explore key poetic forms and techniques that utilize memory, personal history, grief, celebration, desire, trauma, and sensation as valuable tools by which to powerfully render unwieldy human experience in language. Brief readings will be assigned; short craft lessons and discussion are followed by intensive workshop of participants’ poems. Participants will bring three poems, 17 copies each, for which input is desired, to the first workshop meeting.

THE RIB CAGE OF THE POEM: WRITING FORM FROM THE INSIDE OUT with MOLLY PEACOCK

FacWeb-PeacockIn this workshop we will think of poetic structures as a rib cage to let a poem breathe—letting go of the idea that a received form can trap inspiration. Instead, we will explore the surprises of imagination that can occur with forms. Along with student work, we will look at classic and contemporary triolets, sonnets, and villanelles, stretching our ideas of structure from a how-to point of view. To help us in writing from the inside out, there will be daily assignments/suggestions with individually tailored ideas for creating rib cages for your poems. No daily assignment needs to be completed to perfection. My aim is to leave you with an orchardful of possibilities and the courage to try them. We will consider poems in the spirit of expansion, not in terms of perfectionism. Our motto? In the attempt is the success. Participants will submit three poems in advance, considered to be unfinished and that have not been in a workshop elsewhere.

LISTEN TO THIS: SOUND and STRUCTURE IN WRITING POEMS with MAURICE MANNING

FacWeb-ManningRobert Frost once said a poem enters our ear before it enters our eye. I’ve found that a compelling observation. Poems indeed have a certain sound: they sound a certain way, utilize various means for making sound, and through patterns and structures of sound achieve various effects. Some poems, in fact, are better listened to than read. This workshop will look at traditional sound effects poets have used, such as meter, but also consider figures, such as simile and imagery, and how even the figure can be related to sound. In addition to carefully looking at participants’ work, we will read poems provided by the instructor, and do hands-on writing exercises. Participants will send three to five poems in advance, by mail before January 5th, and bring 17 copies of each to the first workshop meeting.

TO DELIGHT, TO INSTRUCT, AND TO WOUND with ROBERT WRIGLEY

FacWeb-WrigleyThere are poems that do one of these things. There are others that do two. It may be that the best do all three. But what is the source of a poem’s delight? How does a poem instruct without becoming overly pedantic or didactic? And how does a poem leave us so happily wounded? This is a workshop that means to be both generative, resulting in new poems, and reactive, confronting and commenting on existing ones. We’ll discuss the terms “delight,” “instruct,” and “wound”; we’ll talk about models that do one or more of these things; and we’ll work to do the same. We’ll write (and share what we write) in class, and we’ll write away from class. Bring writing materials and two poems you want or need response to, with 17 copies for the entire class. Bring good humor, generosity, and rigor.

2008 WORKSHOPS

The 4th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival was held from January 21-26, 2008, at the Old School Square Cultural Arts Center in Delray Beach. Featured poets were: Kim AddonizioRoger Bonair-AgardClaudia EmersonLola HaskinsMajor JacksonThomas LuxMarty McConnellCampbell McGrath, Malena Morling, Sharon Olds, Spencer Reece, and C.K. Williams.

2008 Advanced Workshops

STEALING FIRE with KIM ADDONIZIO

DELIGHT TO WISDOM with CLAUDIA EMERSON

WORD BY WORD, LINE BY LINE with THOMAS LUX

POETRY IS PRICELESS with CAMPBELL MCGRATH

GENERATING NEW WORK with SHARON OLDS

RE-CONCEIVING POEMS with C.K. WILLIAMS

2008 Intermediate Workshops

MUSIC MAKES IT HAPPEN with MAJOR JACKSON

TRANSFORMING POEMS with MALENA MORLING

 

Florida Poets were Lola Haskins and Spencer Reece

WORD BY WORD, LINE BY LINE with THOMAS LUX (2017)

OMG_0436_webWe will pay close attention, in minute detail, to all the elements that go into writing a poem. So: we’ll do word by word, line by line readings. Frost said that the primary way to get to the reader’s heart and mind is through the reader’s ear. The sound, the noise of a poem, demands our attention. We must be tough, honest and direct with each other’s work and also be generous, thoughtful and never condescending or dismissive. A good workshop can do both. Bring in three or four poems, seventeen copies of each, for discussion.

THE POEM’S INTENTION with Stephen Dobyns 2010

Poetry, as well as being an art form, is an act of communication. My role in a workshop is to lead the discussion to what the poet is attempting to communicate and determine why he or she desires to communicate it; that is, what is the poem’s intention? A poem by being, ideally, an equal mix of form and content has the potential to communicate more precisely than any other verbal form, since the manner of its telling tells as much as the matter. The discussion will focus on how the poem is written, the noises it makes, the word choices, how the information is arranged. A poem exists on the page as text and in the air as noise, so sound and sense must be constantly addressed. Since the poem has been submitted to workshop, I assume that it has yet to be completed. My job, and the job of the workshop, is to help make the poem as successful as possible. Bring 3-4 poems, 17 copies of each, for discussion.

ALL THINGS COUNTER, ORIGINAL, SPARE, STRANGE with CHARD deNIORD

webphoto_deniordThis workshop will combine generative prompts and close critiquing of at least three poems by each student. We will focus on the lyric and lyrical narrative, concentrating in particular on “the news that stays news” in a world that has become inundated with news. We will entertain such questions as: what is the nature of the postmodern lyric? How best to incorporate information into the lyric? Can the parts of a lyric in today’s synchronic environment still resonate as transcendent “broken music”? In our attempts to capture a fresh voice and electric economy, we will explore innovative ways in received forms and free verse to wed the unconscious with the conscious, original expression with craft. In addition to our writing and critiquing assignments, we will read several lyrical poems by traditional and contemporary poets, including Emily Dickinson, John Clare, Natasha Trethewey, Bruce Smith, Ruth Stone, Terrance Hayes, James Wright, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Peter Gizzi, and Peter Everwine. Please bring 17 copies of three poems to the first meeting.

“GEM TACTICS:” DEPLOYING ECSTATIC RUSES IN POEMS OF ARDOR with LISA RUSS SPAAR

LISA RUSS SPAAR

“GEM TACTICS”:  DEPLOYING ECSTATIC RUSES IN POEMS OF ARDOR with LISA RUSS SPAAR

Paul Valéry once pointed out that “A poet’s function . . . is not to experience the poetic state:  that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.” How can we create for our reader, in poems, an experience of our “private,” subjective ardor, be it erotic, ecstatic, melancholy, religious, political, quotidian, cosmic, or other?  Metaphor, elision, syntax, juxtaposition, Heaney’s “binding secret” of sound textures, sampling, inter-textuality, varied registers of diction—what Dickinson called her “gem tactics” and Anne Carson: ruses. We will look at how a discerning use of these and other poetic devices help us to say the unsayable, deepen and open our poems to what is at stake in them, as language acts, as testimony, as witness, as play.  Workshop will involve constructive critique of student poems and generation of new material. Participants will send 3-4 poems in advance of the workshop.

 

SOMETHING PATTERNED, WILD AND FREE with TRACY K. SMITH

TRACY K. SMITH

SOMETHING PATTERNED, WILD AND FREE with TRACY K. SMITH

A poem is a conundrum. It is made from language, and yet seeks to describe that which exists beyond or outside of ordinary speech. It begins in pursuit of one idea, image, concept or question, and enacts a “turn” or “transformation” that reveals more than what was initially sought. And the impact of poems—good poems—is to change the reader (and, hopefully, the poet) in ways that resonate well beyond the scope of a single idea or theme. With these ideas in mind, we will spend the first half of each session discussing a brief selection of published poems. The second half will focus on critique of student work. Each participant will have the opportunity to workshop 3 poems in the span of 5 sessions. Upon acceptance to the workshop, poems will be submitted via email by January 1, 2013.

Tracy K. Smith

THE POEM THAT WRITES ITSELF with LAURA KASISCHKE

LAURA KASISCHKE 

THE POEM THAT WRITES ITSELF with Laura Kasischke

In this workshop we will discuss poems, offer critiques, and practice methods to explore memory and use imagination to find material for new poems. (Each poet will workshop three poems during three separate workshops). Through discussion of submitted poems, and some exercises, we’ll examine and discover ways the unconscious might be harnessed in the service of poetry writing. I hope you will learn new approaches that will make poetry writing more effortless and more rewarding, and ways to revise poems that you will surprise you. Bring 3 poems for workshop discussion.

A WORKSHOP ON LAYERING with TONY HOAGLAND

TONY HOAGLAND

A WORKSHOP ON LAYERING with Tony Hoagland

The question in writing poems is always, “How can I do justice to the complexity

of life? How can I not oversimplify human nature?” One way to achieve richness

of texture and implication is “layering.” In this workshop I’ll present examples

of  poems strong in variety of texture, variety of voice, and in layering of

data and diction. I’ll also run exercises which can enlarge your repertoire of

tone, diction, data, and poetic structures to generate new work. Revised drafts

will be considered for discussion. Participants will also bring 2-3 of their poems

they feel would benefit from discussion in workshop and the layering approach.

 

NEW SHADOWS: MOVING POEMS FROM IMITATION TO INNOVATION with TERRENCE HAYES

Terrance Hayes
Terrance Hayes

This workshop is intended to help poets help themselves. It will offer concrete strategies for sustained writing when the only teacher available is a book. We will explore the ways inventive imitation can lead to poetic discovery and innovation. (Think of imitation as transformation not reproduction.) Daily writing assignments will involve discussing and then imitating published poems from a multitude of styles and traditions. Come prepared to generate and share work written in class. In workshops poems will be discussed not for their merit as imitations, but for their originality and potential. No advance submission is necessary.

WORD BY WORD, LINE BY LINE with THOMAS LUX (2015)

Lux_Tom_2015We will pay close attention, in minute detail, to all the elements that go into writing a poem. So: we’ll do word by word, line by line readings. Frost said that the primary way to get to the reader’s heart and mind is through the reader’s ear. The sound, the noise of a poem, demands our attention. We must be tough, honest and direct with each other’s work and also be generous, thoughtful and never condescending or dismissive. A good workshop can do both. Bring in three or four poems, seventeen copies of each, for discussion.

CRAFT MASTERY with B.H. FAIRCHILD

FAIRCHILDIn my poetry workshop participants will critique each other’s poems, followed by a critique from me. Participants should bring along four or five samples of their own work (one-page poems preferred). We will use work by master poets to illustrate and discuss certain matters of craft. I will also make a poetry assignment or two during the course of the week based on the issues raised during our meetings and discussions.

IT’S YOUR WORK: RECENT POEMS & GENERATING POEMS with CARL DENNIS

carldennisWe will spend about half our time looking at the three poems that students send me by regular mail, by December 18th, before the Festival begins. Poems should be typed, not hand written. Students should bring at least 17 copies of each poem to the class, each poem on a separate page. The other half of the time I will be making two writing assignments to be handed in during the week, and we will go over the poems that result. I’ll be handing out model poems for the assignments. The last class will be given over to looking at a revision of one poem by each student.

LAYING THE FOUNDATION: CONCRETE IMAGERY IN POETRY with DENISE DUHAMEL

Denise FinalUsing Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to things” (“Oda a las cosas”) as our maxim, we will explore arrivals to the sublime via naming and detail. William Carlos Williams wrote, “No ideas but in things,” and Pound applied “imagism” to H.D. who was influenced by Sappho’s compressed lyrics. This is to say there are many ways to achieve what Mark Doty calls “metaphor meaning—and meaning intensely.” Poems about any subject are welcome with the understanding that this class will do its best to veer away from abstraction. Please bring along three poems, (17 copies), for discussion. We will also generate new poems and seedlings for poems via prompts that oblige us to pay attention to precision. Participants should be open to the explosive, cathartic, heartbreaking and hilarious effects of symbolism.

POETRY AS BEWILDERMENT with NICK FLYNN

Nick FlynnDuring the week we will examine “bewilderment” by thinking about the concept and how it is acted out in our poems—either through syntax, our accessing the duende, leaps into the unconscious, or simply circling around what is unsaid, unknown, unrealized. We will look for those moments we begin to stutter and stumble when talking about our poems, or in the poems themselves, for these are the thresholds beyond which is unknown, beyond which is the white space on the map. Over the course of our week together we will attempt to push a little deeper into this shadow world. Participants will prepare by keeping a writer’s notebook and bringing a selection of work (2-3 poems) at various states of completion to the first workshop session.

RIVERS THE LIKE SOUL MY GROWN HAS DEEP with CAROL FROST

Carol Frost

Our workshop, while discussing the design of each workshop poem and its performance in that design, will also be concerned with matters of syntax. How far can we pull language? What ambiguities and potential exist for the poet in dislocation, elision, repetition, qualification, and delay? We’ll look at various examples of syntactic symmetry and surprise in poems by poets as diverse as Milton, Dickinson, Ronald Johnson, Langston Hughes, Kinnell, and Brigit Pegeen Kelly, in order to think about the poet’s premeditated and rote placements of words (and ideas) in sentences and across lines; about the extra force of a surprising order; about degrees of obscurity and syntactic freedom. Bring 4-5 poems (17 copies each) to the first workshop meeting. We will cover as many poems as possible in the workshop.  Bring poems for which you want feedback, poems you are working on, in progress, not finished poems. I will speak with participants about poems we don’t get to, or hand back notes on those poems.

CREATE AND CRITIQUE with CAROLYN FORCHÉ

webphoto_ForcheThis guided workshop will be both generative and critique-based; we’ll be looking at past work, learning methods of revision, and writing new poems from prompts and exercises. Poets should bring seventeen copies (each) of three poems they would like the group to read and critique. A blog will be set up to help us to prepare in advance, to aid us in communicating between our meetings, and to foster our community after we leave Palm Beach.