Online Workshop

• MONDAY
  • The Narrative Poem
    Tell a story. If you normally work in a long line, try a short line. If you work in a short line, experiment with a long line. Don't limit yourself to your own stories. Let yourself speak for others. Historychannel.com is a good resource for researching a historical context, and a personal time line helps you discover your own material.


• TUESDAY
  • Creative Larceny
    One way to think about your relationship to the tradition of poetry is as a conversation on the page. They write to you, you write back. Try taking a poem that you love and interweaving lines or write a cento, which is a poem entirely made up of stolen lines.


• WEDNESDAY
  • Argument
    Take a look at your poems and see if your tendency is towards making some sort of argument or declaration, or if you resist that. Try working against your tendency. If your poems tend to simply describe or list, see if there is some longing that you've edited out and declare it. If you tend to make assertions and proofs in your poems, try running the poem backwards line by line to allow the images and sound to remake the sense in a new form.


• THURSDAY
  • Writing from Dream
    Write down a dream as you remember it, without straining for accuracy and allowing any amplifications your subconscious wants to add right now as you write. Don't frame it as a dream. Allow some strangeness into your poems.


• FRIDAY
  • Write from a Headline
    This is a good way to allow some political engagement into the poems. Choose a place to stand where your passions and convictions are somehow ambivalent or uneasy. We tend to think about political work as being about opinions or swaying the opinions of others. If you'd like your poem to have a long shelf life, try staying close to unfinished states like yearning and grief.