Poetry Workshop: Beyond Craft -- Feb. 21

POETRY WORKSHOP: BEYOND CRAFT
Susan Laughter Meyers, instructor
Thursday, Feb. 21
10 a.m. – 2 p.m.
OLLI at CCU
Litchfield Exchange location
(exact venue TBA)
Register in person or online at webadvisor.coastal.edu (click on Continuing Ed)
$30, plus OLLI membership
 

When starting a poem, you are often writing blindly, not following a familiar path or arriving at answers but moving in uncertainty. The overriding issue is not a matter of craft—but how to proceed, how to find your way to the real poem. Class packet included. Within two weeks after the workshop, participants have the option of e-mailing a poem to the instructor for feedback. Lunch can be brought or bought nearby. (You may want to bring your own lunch, since our exact venue is uncertain.)

How important is our poetry?
          

            “The words you speak

            become the house
            you live in.”                    —Hafiz

 

Yes, we are choosing words. But when we’re deep in the process of writing, they are partly choosing us, too. Without measuring each move, we accrue sounds, rhythms, meanings, connotations, and so much more along the way. Each of us and our words are building something, the poem. It’s a makeshift hut we’re constructing in that first draft. Somewhere in our messy construction site is the real poem, or the path to it, and our job is to find it.

Please come join us for the workshop!