I'm reviving this blog because for the past year I've coordinated a weekly poetry salon named Wednesdays@One. The salon is part workshop, part sharing, part performance, and part inquiry into the nature of poetry, poetics, theory, craft, voice and delivery, and literary history.
Our group is made up of 6-10 writers of all experiences and capabilities. Some are seasoned writers of 25 years and more, some are new to the art. Some hold MFAs, some are academics, some are former English majors, and some are just people keenly interested in poetry. Everybody is serious about writing poetry.
Each week we develop a project that emphasizes a technical matter (meter and rhythm, for instance, or lineation), an artistic component (e.g., deep image, deployment of metaphor, how poems end), formal options (sonnet, ballad, short form poems, narrative structure in a poem, lyric, riddle), thematic approaches (ekphrasis, gendered writing/investigation, satire, fabulist), or other topic.
Each project comes with a short backgrounder with examples and a sharing, followed up by a written discussion of each poet's contribution. These are not so much "assignments" and critiques as ideas meant to exercise certain poetic "muscles" along with my reactions to what I am reading from the group.
Over the past year I've stockpiled a good-sized library of notes, more or less desultory, on the making of poems that I've shared with my cohort. They appreciate it, I think. I'd like to start sharing it with a wider audience.
Don't expect this material to be too academic or programmatic. Wednesdays@One is not MFA Poetry 401, or a standard workshop or a book club. Or rather, it is all these things (w/o the advanced degree) plus a survey in the history of poetic forms. The best description I can give it is "salon."
If you're visiting this blog through the Program for Jazz web site, know that the poetry is part and parcel of my larger interest of exploring the art's sound and rhythmic dimensions. I hope you visit often.
Our group is made up of 6-10 writers of all experiences and capabilities. Some are seasoned writers of 25 years and more, some are new to the art. Some hold MFAs, some are academics, some are former English majors, and some are just people keenly interested in poetry. Everybody is serious about writing poetry.
Each week we develop a project that emphasizes a technical matter (meter and rhythm, for instance, or lineation), an artistic component (e.g., deep image, deployment of metaphor, how poems end), formal options (sonnet, ballad, short form poems, narrative structure in a poem, lyric, riddle), thematic approaches (ekphrasis, gendered writing/investigation, satire, fabulist), or other topic.
Each project comes with a short backgrounder with examples and a sharing, followed up by a written discussion of each poet's contribution. These are not so much "assignments" and critiques as ideas meant to exercise certain poetic "muscles" along with my reactions to what I am reading from the group.
Over the past year I've stockpiled a good-sized library of notes, more or less desultory, on the making of poems that I've shared with my cohort. They appreciate it, I think. I'd like to start sharing it with a wider audience.
Don't expect this material to be too academic or programmatic. Wednesdays@One is not MFA Poetry 401, or a standard workshop or a book club. Or rather, it is all these things (w/o the advanced degree) plus a survey in the history of poetic forms. The best description I can give it is "salon."
If you're visiting this blog through the Program for Jazz web site, know that the poetry is part and parcel of my larger interest of exploring the art's sound and rhythmic dimensions. I hope you visit often.
