In this new one-week intensive workshop designed for intermediate to advanced poets, you will explore fundamentally new approaches to subject manner while writing new poems and revising old ones. The class will also explore the intersection of the public and the private in poetry, and students will be encouraged to engage in an animated dialogue about the topic.

This one-week poetry workshop will offer instruction, support, and dialogue in the craft of writing and revising poems. This class is for intermediate to advanced poets that would like to try fundamentally new approaches to subject matter. We are going to adopt a theme of “Gazing In Gazing Out,” which is drawn from Larry Levis’ essay “Some Notes on the Gazer Within.” I often wonder about the public and the private in poetry, perhaps in any art, and whether a healthy artistic impulse must somehow balance or contain both. I would like to know what you think. Are you in the habit of consciously directing your own lyrical energies within and/or without, toward the public or even political as well as the personal? In your own evolving aesthetic, do you think you’d lean one way or another, or can you perhaps imagine doing both? We’ll begin this discussion by reading and responding to Levis’ essay. You’ll be invited also to submit for feedback an unfinished poem that exemplifies either the inward or outward gaze. You’ll then write and submit one new poem of each type and discuss online. At the end of the week, we’ll discuss possibilities for revision in a one-on-one email exchange.