2024 Workshops & Faculty

Has there ever been a better time to lift your spirits (and your readers’) with a little humor? In this workshop, we’ll explore ways to mine funny poems from ordinary occurrences, relationships, and things—even ones that may seem to have no comic potential. We’ll seek inspiration in poets past and present, test-drive some brainstorming techniques and writing exercises, and, best of all, make people in other rooms wonder what the hell we’re all laughing about.

The Master Poets Critical Seminar gives us the exciting opportunity to study a master poet, develop our ideas and practice, and engage in meaningful conversation with others about the poetry of a great artist. Led by David M. Katz, this year’s seminar will focus on close readings of the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, with an eye towards sharpening our own work. What can we, as poets, learn from Bishop about scene-setting from this most painterly of poets? About articulating a sense of place from her great evocations of sea and shoreline, highway and roadside? About adjusting our verse to its subject matter from Bishop’s fluid uses of form and free verse?  In preparation for the seminar, participants will independently study Bishop’s poetry. At the Conference, they will each be asked to make a brief presentation to other seminar participants on a Bishop poem of their choice or on an aspect of her work. Participants can opt for the seminar when registering for the 2024 Conference. For more information or to contact the seminar leader, email poetryby_thesea@yahoo.com with the subject line “Seminar.”

Since its invention by Henry Howard in 1540, blank verse has proven to be one of the most versatile, expansive, and dynamic forms of Anglophone poetry. Without it, much of the greatest poetry written in English simply would not exist. Blank verse can yield a megalith like Paradise Lost, the “divine chit-chat” of Cowper, or the crackerbarrel vernacular of Frost. Or it can be, as it has been for the most importants poets of every age, what the Bonneville salt flats are for race car drivers: a place to open things up and test all your powers of innovation and execution. In this workshop, we’ll look at some expressive textures of blank verse (e.g., pyrotechnic, monumental, meditative, casual) and consider some of the local effects of timing and emphasis that are available to writers working in the form. In addition to workshopping poetry by participants, we will discuss blank verse from the 16th to the 21st centuries, looking closely at examples from Surrey to Erica Dawson. A comprehensive packet will be provided.

Like dances that never go out of style, certain poetic forms are perennial favorites among writers and readers alike. Sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, ballads, pantoums, etc., often dominate our imaginations when it comes to working in traditional verse forms. But what about a rispetto? Or the bref double? You’ve probably written some haiku, but have you ever tried the dodoitsu or a katauta? 

In this 2-day workshop, we will learn and try out several underrepresented poetic forms from around the world in order to widen our perspectives and provide fresh avenues for discovery–writing new poems along the way and revising in-progress drafts as we go. 

Our poems exist in the context and interplay of poems already written. In this workshop, we’ll join the tradition of poets responding to the work of poets who came before us. We’ll write and discuss our own “after” poems—poems that recast, revise, renew, reimagine, and maybe even reject modern and contemporary works that are part of our personal canon. Our result will be poems that transcend imitation, homage, and critique to become vital and original, truly our own.

Have you always wanted to write in meter, but find that its rhythms and subtleties elude you? Or, do you have a metrical poem or poem project for which you can’t quite get the meter RIGHT? Have no fear, Anna M. Evans is here to help. Her undergraduate-tested method of ‘teaching’ meter will have you effortlessly creating iambic pentameter in no time. And she never met a line she couldn’t fix (← that’s iambic pentameter right there, admittedly with a first foot anapest). Sign up for a 30 minute tutorial, and Anna will email you to arrange a time convenient to you at the conference.

The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project, an online database currently containing 50+ such essays founded by Dr. Kim Bridgford, will return next year.

Petrarch wrote hundreds of sonnets for a woman he barely knew. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz wrote passionate love lyrics as a nun. Frank O’Hara invented his “Personism” movement while drafting a love poem and realizing he “could use the telephone instead.” What are poets doing, or hoping to do, when they address the ones they love? How can poems evoke a genuine romantic connection? What about a frustrated or failed connection? How can poets portray the objects of their affection without reducing them to—well, objects? In this workshop, we’ll consider these age-old questions while discussing participants’ own love lyrics. Poets should bring one poem (2 pages max, about someone the speaker loves, desires, or misses) for discussion.

This workshop will focus on how chapbooks can aid and abet a poet’s career, regardless of whether a poet has never published one or has published many books. We’ll talk about the difference between full length poetry collections, chapbooks, and microchapbooks. We’ll discuss what subjects are more suited for the shorter page limits of chapbooks, and will debate whether books devoted to a single poetic form are more suitable for chapbook presentation than in a longer book. We’ll discuss the phenomenon of the “chapbook starting poem”–defined as that remarkable poem that lets you know a chapbook is underway. Finally, we’ll talk about chapbook publishers, both finding one for your manuscripts or becoming one to publish works by other poets. Bring a chapbook in progress if you have one!

In a letter written in 1924, Hart Crane wrote, “I try to make my poems experiences, I rather don’t try, when they are good they are.”  I think we all know what Crane means: the best poems seem to go beyond recording or describing experience.  Instead, the poems themselves are experiences, their form, voice, language, or imagery so alive that when reading them, we lose ourselves in the poem’s words and music.   We may describe such poems as Emily Dickinson did, who said,  “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”  Emily Dickinson here describes a poem whose effect on the reader is not just aesthetic or intellectual but physical. Visceral.

In this workshop, we’ll explore what seem to be the essential aspects of visceral poetry—using plenty of examples along the way—and will suggest strategies for re-thinking your writing process to harness that power in our work.  Come ready to have the top of your head taken off.

Confessional poetry often gets a bad rap. Critics (including those who have been labeled “confessional poets” themselves) describe it as self-indulgent and even whiny, prioritizing emotion over craft. In this workshop, we will explore the nuance of the confessional style, as well as the relationship between heavy, personal subject matter and technique, especially in formal poems.

At what point does displaying vulnerability in a poem become a melodramatic rant instead of a carefully constructed work of art? When it comes to disclosing emotional details in poetry, is there such a thing as too much? And what even is a confession anyway, as opposed to storytelling? Please come prepared with a confessional poem of your choice and the desire to get into the nitty gritty!