Poetry workshop at SCCTE Conference, Kiawah Island, SC

Thanks to Hope Spillane for inviting me to teach a poetry workshop for the South Carolina Council of Teachers of English at their annual conference at Kiawah Island, SC, a couple of weekends ago. The workshop was on the morning of January 27, a day that started out rainy but had brightened up by the start of the class; so we pulled back the heavy draperies of the conference room to let the beauty of Kiawah Island be our inspiration. It was a pleasure to work with a room full of teachers eager to talk about and write poetry.

Our topic was "Writing toward a Poem's Mystery." To explore that subject we spent time reading and discussing published poems by poets such as Charles Simic, Kay Ryan, and Thomas Transtromer; and then we tried our hand at a group poem, which we read in a round-robin approach after each participant wrote one line of the poem. An impressive group!