Workshops
Three Amazing Poets, One Incredible Week of Workshops, Seminars, and Readings Online!
There are no available registration dates at this time.
THE WRITERS HARBOR® POETRY WEEK WILL TAKE PLACE ON-CAMPUS IN 2022! CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE AND REGISTER.
2021 Poetry Week Poets:
RICHARD BLANCO * TESS TAYLOR * RICK BAROT
Upon registering you will be given the chance to select the Poet with whom you would like to study during the week. Book your seat early to ensure a space in your preferred class!
Each day you will begin your workshop at noon (ET) with your poetry instructor. Workshop registrations remain limited to no more than 12 participants per instructor, so you’ll have the experience of personal attention from the faculty and your fellow poets.
Later on in the afternoon and evenings there will be craft seminar and readings. This gives you the opportunity to learn from all three poets over the course of the week. (Check here for the full schedule)
Evening readings will also take place on Zoom. These will be open to all participants as well as the larger community – invite your friends and family to these offerings.
Student readings will be held on Friday afternoon to give everyone a chance to share their work with faculty, fellow poets, friends, and family.
Technical support will be available throughout the week to help you if you are not already accustomed to using Zoom and other online tools.
Join us for an exciting week online this year to study with one of these accomplished poets!
View Full Poetry Week Schedule
Header Image: Abbe Lyle/Scott Strimple
3 Amazing Poets:
Richard Blanco's Workshop
Whether candid snapshots, cell phone images, or formal portraits, photographs are replete with conscious and unconscious stories to mine. In the interdisciplinary spirit of Maine Media Workshops and College, we will use personal photographs as prompts to write poems that explore our emotional responses to those rich stories. Have on hand 2 or 3 family photos (sharing is optional) that have resonated with you emotionally and have somehow always captivated or intrigued you. Don’t over-think your choice of photos—be instinctual. Then, we will take new photographs of our own to explore how our poetic eye—like the eye of a camera—focuses and frames our experiences; we’ll then “redevelop” these photos into poems. All poems will be shared in dynamic and interactive workshop sessions as we continue to investigate the relationships between imagery, imagination, and story. In addition, through interactive lectures, exercises, and readings of various illustrative poems, we will dive deeper into some of the core techniques of poetry, namely: sensory details, modulations of the poetic line, figurative language, and linguistic musicality.
Tess Taylor's Workshop
Where are you from and how do you root there? What are the words and sounds of your place? How do you write about "home"? In this workshop, you'll study the way poems appropriate disciplines from art history to biology to geology to sound in order to build and explore the worlds they make. You'll develop strategies to write your own poems of place and home. You'll lean into your story, celebrating the soil, plant names, dialect words, and microhistories that help to build rich poems. The workshop is geared to beginners and experts alike with readings and generative exercises each day. Come prepared to explore your roots, read and craft poems that define your own geography.
Rick Barot's Workshop
In this poetry workshop you'll engage with Risk and Ingenuity. We'll discuss these concepts, and you'll be invited to think about subjects that you don't ordinarily explore in your writing. You'll be challenged to think about what it might mean to write about those subjects. And you'll learn about "formal Ingenuity" - how form can help explore a subject -- not necessarily traditional or rigid forms but the most complex shape that the poems needs to manifest your subject. Whether you're a beginner or experienced poet, you'll learn to take risks in content, form, and style.
