Please join us in MIDDLEBURY AS LOCAL POET PARTRIDGE BOSWELL, author
of "Some Far Country", leads a three-part CRAFT WORKSHOP THAT WILL
BENEFIT WRITERS OF ALL GENRES. Please stay tuned for more information
and, if you have a question, please post below. We look forward to
seeing you all!The Craft of Poetry: Three Workshops with Partridge
Boswell
Wednesdays, February 7 & 21 and March 7, 2018 @ 6pm
Ilsley Public Library, 75 Main Street, Middlebury, Vermont
“Our real poems are already in us / and all we can do is dig” says
Jonathan Galassi. So too echoes Seamus Heaney with his squat pen snug
between finger and thumb, digging “down and down / For the good
turf.” Our excavations as poets can lead to powerful
discoveries—revelations that can remain nebulous and elusive, caked
in viscera, but for the poet’s special tools. The crafting of
memorable poems requires both an archeologist’s persistence and an
alchemist’s skillful magic to prize gold (or good turf) from the
bedrock of language. A basic understanding of poetic craft can help
transmute raw inspiration and words we all use every day into art
that’s palpable and more deeply resonant than meaning alone.
This series will benefit poets and non-poets at any level who want to
improve their writing, from the inside-out & bottom-up, bones & all.
In three bi-weekly sessions poets will be (re)introduced to elements
of craft—devices which accompany us consciously and unconsciously as
we excavate and make the poem within. Reading excerpts from Jane
Hirshfield, Kim Addonizio, Mary Oliver, Mark Strand, Eavan Boland,
Ellen Bryant Voigt, Richard Hugo and Annie Finch, along with diverse
and ample poems as examples along the way, you’ll gather useful
tools to help you shape your raw material and bring the experience of
your poem to life.
Alongside craft discussions, we’ll be writing and revising as we go.
Participants will each bring two hard copies of two poems to the first
session. The first session begins with an overview of fundamental
craft elements and energies—including Music, Form, Line, Imagery,
Voice, Tone, Diction and Revision. We’ll discuss each other’s
poems during the second session, in tandem with further exploration of
craft. In the final session we’ll delve further examples and focus
on revision within the evolving context of craft. “It is never much
use to say a poem works, or fails, without saying why,” Mary Oliver
observes. At the end of this workshop, writers will be better equipped
with a tangible common lexicon to inform future workshop discussions,
a deepened awareness as readers of poetry, and a more diverse and
nuanced palette with which to compose adventurous, fully conscious
poems and poetically infused prose. (Reading texts and shovels
provided.)
Workshop Leader:
Recipient of the Edna St. Vincent Millay and Red Wheelbarrow Poetry
Prizes, Partridge Boswell is the author of Some Far Country (Grolier
Poetry Prize). His poems have recently surfaced in The Gettysburg
Review, Salmagundi, The American Poetry Review, Green Mountains
Review, Plume and Forklift, Ohio. Co-founder of Bookstock literary
festival and the poetry/music group Los Lorcas, he’s a teacher and
trustee at Burlington Writers Workshop and lives with his family in
Vermont.
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14/12/2018 Last update