In Middlebury: Craft Series 2 0f 3 with Partridge Boswell

Please join us in Middlebury as local poet Partridge Boswell, author of "Some Far Country", leads a three-part craft workshop that will benefit writers of all genres. The Craft of Poetry: Three Workshops with Partridge Boswell

Wednesdays, February 7 & 21 and March 7, 2018 @ 6pm

Ilsley Public Library, 75 Main Street, Middlebury, Vermont

“Our real poems are already in us / and all we can do is dig” says Jonathan Galassi. So too echoes Seamus Heaney with his squat pen snug between finger and thumb, digging “down and down / For the good turf.” Our excavations as poets can lead to powerful discoveries—revelations that can remain nebulous and elusive, caked in viscera, but for the poet’s special tools. The crafting of memorable poems requires both an archeologist’s persistence and an alchemist’s skillful magic to prize gold (or good turf) from the bedrock of language. A basic understanding of poetic craft can help transmute raw inspiration and words we all use every day into art that’s palpable and more deeply resonant than meaning alone.

This series will benefit poets and non-poets at any level who want to improve their writing, from the inside-out & bottom-up, bones & all. In three bi-weekly sessions poets will be (re)introduced to elements of craft—devices which accompany us consciously and unconsciously as we excavate and make the poem within. Reading excerpts from Jane Hirshfield, Kim Addonizio, Mary Oliver, Mark Strand, Eavan Boland, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Richard Hugo and Annie Finch, along with diverse and ample poems as examples along the way, you’ll gather useful tools to help you shape your raw material and bring the experience of your poem to life.

Alongside craft discussions, we’ll be writing and revising as we go. Participants will each bring two hard copies of two poems to the first session. The first session begins with an overview of fundamental craft elements and energies—including Music, Form, Line, Imagery, Voice, Tone, Diction and Revision. We’ll discuss each other’s poems during the second session, in tandem with further exploration of craft. In the final session we’ll delve further examples and focus on revision within the evolving context of craft. “It is never much use to say a poem works, or fails, without saying why,” Mary Oliver observes. At the end of this workshop, writers will be better equipped with a tangible common lexicon to inform future workshop discussions, a deepened awareness as readers of poetry, and a more diverse and nuanced palette with which to compose adventurous, fully conscious poems and poetically infused prose. (Reading texts and shovels provided.)

Workshop Leader:

Recipient of the Edna St. Vincent Millay and Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prizes, Partridge Boswell is the author of Some Far Country (Grolier Poetry Prize). His poems have recently surfaced in The Gettysburg Review, Salmagundi, The American Poetry Review, Green Mountains Review, Plume and Forklift, Ohio. Co-founder of Bookstock literary festival and the poetry/music group Los Lorcas, he’s a teacher and trustee at Burlington Writers Workshop and lives with his family in Vermont.