Poetic Revision and Praxis

When we talk about each other’s poetry in a workshop, we’re working through the poem’s theoretical immanence, the if: if you move this line, if you change the title, if you consider the mother's motivation. In offering these ideas we hope that the poet is able to imagine the other poem we see within it, the proverbial horse in the marble and so we return to our solitary practice with the echoes of these suggestions, but also mired in them. In this class, we’ll be doing a collaborative revision of a poem much the way improvisational theater encourages participation. Using syntactical, lexical, and ephemeral clues that the rough draft of a poem we'll quickly write offers, we’ll collectively push the poem through multiple drafts, share our strategies as poets, and see what revision looks like in person.