This workshop will draw inspiration from the counsel of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” In this spirit, we will experiment with different generative exercises and look to contemporary as well as canonical poems to guide us, to challenge us, and to spur us on. Our workshop discussions will devote time to carefully considering the ambitions, achievements, and possibilities of poems by each workshop participant, and we will look at some examples of revision processes by well-known poets to aid us in developing strategies for our own revision and re-making. Please bring 17 copies of three poems-in-progress to the first meeting.
MARY SZYBIST is most recently the author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Her first book Granted was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the GLCA New Writers Award. She lives in Portland, Oregon where she teaches at Lewis & Clark College.
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