2023 Summer Workshops
This workshop is part of our Poetry Festival.
Revision is a wildly generative practice for a writer, but it is also idiosyncratic. Many of us resist the process because we’re afraid to hurt our poems or because we don’t know when to walk away, which may be why Thomas Mann once said, “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” In this workshop we will enact different strategies of revision on existing poems. From line-level decisions to more global thematic concerns, we will first consider the theoretical and aesthetic concepts that inform our process, then we will work to develop a praxis that is reflective and thorough— that helps deepen our understanding of how we push our work into its greatest possibilities.
Biography
Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of seven books including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry and most recently, Cruel Futures published by City Lights. She was awarded an American Book Award for Bring Down the Little Birds and the Juniper Prize for Poetry for her collection Goodbye, Flicker. She also co-edited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing. She is a co-director for CantoMundo, publisher of Noemi Press.