Workshop: Poetry
Full--Wait List Only
POETRY WITH BETSY SHOLL
Engaging with the World in Our Poems with Betsy Sholl
Driving on the turnpike once I saw a tiny canvas and easel set up on a broad open hillside with no painter anywhere in sight. There are so many ways the invisible painter might have worked–with realism, surrealism, or abstraction, with concrete detail, close up, or a wide-angled view.
In this fraught time where we are living, how do we want our poems to engage? Should we transcribe the troubles we see or create an alternate world? How much of the world do we want in our poems? In this workshop we’ll look at different responses and explore ways of engaging the world and our own unique relationship to it, ways to balance our inner and outer lives. There will be a handout that contains poems that use a range of styles and devices. We will focus on writing new drafts, but each participant should bring at least one poem that she or he wants to revise in fresh ways.
+ SUBMIT Participants are asked to please submit in advance three pages and up to three poems; i.e. one three-page poem, three one-page poems, etc. Email the manuscript no later than 9:00 a.m. on October 7 to director@mainewriters.org with the subject line: “POETRY MSS.”
Betsy Sholl served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011. Her ninth collection of poetry is House of Sparrows, New and Selected Poems (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). Otherwise Unseeable won the 2015 Maine Literary Award for poetry. Other awards include the AWP Prize for Poetry, the Felix Pollak Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and two Maine Individual Artists Grants. She currently teaches in the MFA Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives in Portland, Maine.
Registration
To register online, please use the form below.
To register by phone or if you have questions about the retreat, please call 207-228-8264.