Poetry II [Keetje Kuipers]

You’ve done a workshop, or maybe you’ve done a few. You enjoy playing with metaphor and image in your poems, and you’ve even tried your hand at some formal verse, like a sonnet or a pantoum. You don’t always know the technical term for what you’re doing in your poems, but sometimes you think you’d like to learn. And you’ve started to notice that there are certain things you’re drawn to write about—illness, love, the ocean—and you want to figure out how to write about them again and again without writing the same poem a hundred times.

This intermediate workshop is designed for writers who already come to the page on their own. Though we will do plenty of in-class writing exercises, you’ve likely got a notebook stuffed in your bag and filled with scribbled lines of verse. This workshop is also for poets who are seeking out new authors to read or who are interested in attending more literary events. We will be reading work by a diverse set of authors, including Jericho Brown, AE Stallings, and Robert Wrigley—all poets who will be reading in Seattle this fall. Because if you’re on the poetry path, you not only want to write poems, you also want to read them (and find out, too, how it is that some people are publishing them).

The intermediate workshop is for a broad range of writers—you’re not a beginner, but you wouldn’t necessarily call yourself an expert. However, there are a few things we will all have in common when we come together each week: We will be broadening our poetic horizons through in-class reading and writing, and discovering own personal writing goals as poets and artists, be that mastering a craft skill or publishing one of your poems in a reputable literary magazine. We will also be reading each other’s work with a keen eye, not only to improve these individual poems, but also in order to acquire the invaluable skill of revision as something that can be practiced on your own outside of workshop. All these undertakings are the exciting next steps on your path as a writer.