Thanks to those who attended yesterday's workshop at the CCU Waccamaw Center on "Writing toward a Poem's Mystery." Our discussion and close reading of the poems in the class packet has left me with much to think about, and I hope it has for the others in the class, too. Plus, I enjoyed hearing everyone read the new poems started in class yesterday--not to mention the pleasure that our group poem brought us all.
The workshop I'll be teaching in the spring semester will be "The Usefulness of Silence," which will include some of these considerations: A poem’s silences fulfill a purpose just as the words do. Thus, poets need to know how to use white space, punctuation, elliptical syntax, the unspoken—and the many other ways to be silent in a poem. We’ll read sample published poems, discuss how they manage their silences, and write poems of our own.
I'm already looking forward to it.
