What’s to be done with those poems stuffed in folders or buried in a stack, unfinished and abandoned? If you’re like me, those poems contain gems of words and insight, maybe a few well-wrought lines, but you can’t seem to keep the energy going or capture the concept. This four-session workshop offers proven revision strategies for structuring, tightening, electrifying, and deepening your poems with richer meaning and authenticity. We’ll read poems by our best writers to see how they achieve clarity, density, musicality, coherence, and mastery of form, and all without showing the effort. We’ll look at some of their early drafts, too. Besides bringing an older, unfinished poem to the workshop, then bringing back its revision for the group’s review, you’ll also produce new work to share and revise. The give and take of workshop experience leads without fail to better poems.

Here are a few of the strategies and skills you’ll learn:

• Create unforgettable opening lines
• Find the poem’s story or concept
• Know where and how to break lines
• New ways of looking at title creation
• Gain impact through powerful words, images and figures of speech
• Use rhythm and sound associations to make your poems sing
• Rely less on logic and increasingly more on intuition and subconscious impressions

Please note: This class is an online class. To participate, students must have a stable internet connection and a computer or device with a webcam and microphone.