To apply to attend a festival workshop, use our online application!
Workshops are limited to 12 qualified participants and 3 auditors to provide a meaningful level of discussion, and careful, informed attention to your work. Beginning poets, shy about sharing their poems, should consider auditing a workshop as a great way to learn by observing and listening. Review our Application Guidelines for more details and the workshop descriptions that follow on this page. Click the following link to see our brochure in pdf format.
WORKSHOPS FOR QUALIFIED WRITERS OF POETRY
NOW LOOK WHAT YOU HAVE DONE with Stuart Dischell
This intense workshop will consider the conscious and unconscious choices poets face regarding the structures and strategies of their poems. We will look closely at the way poems are made and how their crafting affects the sense they make. The pace will be fast-moving; the atmosphere lively, critical, helpful, supportive, and more than likely humorous. Bring 3 of your poems plus a poem you admire that accomplishes something you would like to do in your own work. 17 copies of each.
ENLARGING POEMS with Jane Hirshfield
The “enlarging” of this workshop’s title is not about length, but about possibility. We will stretch from familiar ground toward the new, whether new reaches of language, of voice, of subject, or of self. The workshop will be devoted primarily to writing new poems, each day bringing a different set of energies, craft strategies, and approaches to that task. We will work in the spirit of “starts,” experiments, generous explorations. We will also consider one previously written poem (possibly two) by each participant over the workshop’s course. Please bring writing materials; 17 copies of two previously written poems you do not consider finished; and five poems (not your own) you find thrilling (a page or less, no copies needed).
WORD BY WORD, LINE BY LINE with Thomas Lux
We 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.
An Architecture of Senses with Heather McHugh
We shall examine the ways in which poems can radiate senses, and we'll pay particular attention to details of their design. Looking closely at published poems to illustrate some principles, we'll apply the same alertness to your own work. This kind of close reading for structural designs (as distinct from received forms) isn't done in a snap of the fingers: during the course of the whole festival we may be able to study only one or two poems by each workshop member--but you'll be able readily to extrapolate to your other work, and to the larger implications for art itself. You will send five poems for review and I will choose one or two for “workshop” discussion that will serve the thematic and pedagogical lines along which I’ll design the class.
THE PLOT OF THE POEM with Vijay Seshadri
Poems often are narratives. They also often have narratives within them, whether resolved or unresolved. But whether a poem is a story or a pure lyric it always has a plot—one determined either by action or emotion or both. We will look at the plots of narrative poems, dramatic poems driven by a persona, and pure lyrics, to determine the ways in which plot, richly and broadly conceived as the proper arrangement of action both real and symbolic, creates meaning intended and unintended in a poem while simultaneously creating the vessel in which such meaning abides. We will workshop previously written student poems and student poems generated from exercises, and will intersperse workshopping with a close reading of canonical poems. Students should come prepared to talk and should bring 17 copies of 4 previously written poems.
THE CRAFT OF POETRY with Ellen Bryant Voigt
I like to choose an underlying—and lifelong—craft topic as an overall stimulus/focus to the discussion of work in progress (by YOU). This provides a lens we are collectively peering through, and helps guide us past aesthetic preference and judgment toward analysis and discovery. In order for us to create this brief seminar in craft: (1) it is imperative that you submit four pages of your work at least a week in advance of the workshop (and please also bring thirteen copies for the group), and (2) we will probably discuss in the group only one whole poem, thoroughly, by each workshop member. I will also hope to see revision of that poem during the week, have workshop members exchange revisions, and if time allows provide a response to the revision during workshop or our conference session.
WRITING AT THE EDGES OF THINGS with C.D. Wright
Being fierce, strange, calamitous, glowing, erroneous, blameless, side-splitting, starless, right-brained, formidable and unsure--now is the time to find the language compatible with your own condition. Whether one is writing to make amends, to get even, to fill the void, to impress the father, or just to pay off a few parking tickets… there are words for those motives and there is a shape for those words. As W.S. Merwin put it, "Never fear there is a hair hanging by everything it is the edges of things." Bring new writing every day. Bring nothing you have written in advance of arriving. Writing will be done in and out of the workshop setting.
POETRY LAB with Dean Young
The emphasis of our meetings will be on the exploratory aspects of the work turned in. We will not try to fix or correct the poems. Instead, we will concentrate on identifying the important choices each work illustrates, the implications of those choices in terms of relation to other poems as well as that individual poem's aims and accomplishments. Participants are encouraged to submit work that isn’t so much finished, rather indication of an on-going poetic journey. Bring 5-7 poems, (17 copies) to the first workshop.
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