Workshop Descriptions 

Jon D. Lee

First workshop: The Art of Compression. 

In a good, tight novel, it should be impossible to remove even a single scene without impoverishing the overall work. In a short story, this shrinks down to the impossibility of removing even a single paragraph. But in a poem it shrinks down the level of the word. Such compression is evident in many definitions of poetry, including that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who in 1827 defined poetry as “the best words in the best order.” This session will seek to examine the nature of compression through several poems and exercises, as well as a before-and-after examination of an edited poem, and ultimately demonstrate that the best editing tool a poet often has is the delete button.

Second workshop: Negative Capability and Metaphor. 

Metaphor and negative capability form the beating heart of good poetry, creating a systolic tension that drives the line across and down the page through nuances of meaning. Using such poems as ee cumming's "She being Brand" and Leslie Norris's "Hudson's Geese," this workshop will entail a close examination of metaphor and conceit, and the necessity of poems never fully closing their doors. 

Third workshop: The Ode.

The ode is one of poetry's oldest forms, as well as its most necessary to examine, containing within its structure the basic call-and-response of image and movement that drives all good poetry and can be found in both formed and free-verse poetry. Historically taking a more formal and ceremonious tone, the ode has in the modern era moved into far more casual and exploratory forms, but its lessons and underlying structures have remained largely the same. Using such poets as Pablo Neruda and Sharon Olds, this workshop will examine the tripartite strophe/antistrophe/epode structure of the basic ode and show how the form can be applied across a wide range of subjects and writing styles.

Lisa Bickmore

Grief songs and the material of poetry

Sometimes grief is a river that you walk along, from its source until it empties into open water. Grief can also be a recurring motif in a piece of music; a color that recurs in a palette; a shape-shifting figure in a dream; an intermittent companion. Elegy is commonly thought of as the de facto poetic vessel for grief. Of elegy, Mark Strand and Eavan Boland wrote, “the structure of an elegy is less visible than [in] a regulated form such as a sonnet or a villanelle. But the structure is there nonetheless—made of the slowly evolving customs and decorums, the coral reef of what each society expects a public poem of lament to contain and an elegiac poet to focus on.” In the three sessions of this workshop, we will explore how grief and the elegiac impulse constellate and accrete in poems, how grief connects with lived experience in the material world in countless ways, and how we might more artfully, intentionally, and even playfully work with that material in our own work. We will read elegiac/grief-grounded poems by Brenda Hillman, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Layli Long Soldier, William Stafford, and others, and draw written work from our dialogue with these poems and one another. 

David Lee

Dave comes out of retirement for one session this year to help us look at "The Perfect Poem."