This year’s fine selection of One-Day Workshops means participants can select from several excellent workshop options on nearly every day of the conference. And since One-Day Workshops do not overlap time-wise with each other or with Three- and Two-Day Workshops, you can choose just one—or even all four.
Here’s a short intro to each workshop. Visit the 2023 Workshops & Faculty page for more detailed descriptions of workshops and bios of the faculty.
Start off Wednesday morning with Clare Rossini’s A FEAST OF FREE-VERSE FORMS:
Free verse “form”? Isn’t that an oxymoron? But in fact, most free-verse poets create an infrastructure of stanza, line, and white space to give their poems a distinctive look on the page and, equally important, an original music. We’ll look at a wide variety of models by contemporary American poets; a packet of examples will be provided to each participant.
On Thursday morning, drop into CUT-UP, COLLAGE, AND CRIBBING: A GENERATIVE POETRY WORKSHOP, with Matt W. Miller:
There’s nothing more terrifying to the poet than the blank page, not knowing how to start and with the crushing weight of infinite possibility available. In this workshop we will whittle away the infinite and sidestep this terror by starting from words that are already out there. We will look at works of other poets as stepping-off points using lines, language, cut-ups and collages, and even form as ways to begin, insert, or just scaffold our own poems. And then we’ll see what happens when we pull that scaffolding away.
Keep the One-Day Workshop momentum going on Thursday afternoon with Austin Allen and SUPPOSED PEOPLE: PERSONA POEMS AND DRAMATIC MONOLOGUES:
Critics use the term “speaker,” wary of conflating the poet and the voice on the page. As poets know, that wariness is often wise. In this session, we’ll workshop poems whose speaker feels meaningfully different from you, the writer—including persona poems, dramatic monologues, and poems in the voice of a younger or older self. In the process, we’ll consider what makes a convincing poetic alter ego and how subtle changes in poetic voice can alter the reader’s experience.
Complete your week at the Conference on Friday morning with Chad Abushanab and THE WRITTEN WORD HEARD: FROM THE PAGE TO THE STAGE:
Nothing beats a good poetry reading—except a great one. In this workshop, we will examine a range of poems that feel particularly ripe for live performance, identify just what makes these pieces so dynamic on the stage, and learn to incorporate those elements into our own poems—creating new work and revising old to sound more dramatic, more impactful, and, yes, more musical.
Remember that whichever registration package you choose, you always have the chance to add One-Day Workshops before completing your registration. For questions, please use the form on the Contact page to send us an email.
Can you send me an application listing $costs and guidelines for the retreat???
Everything is online.