Explorer Bundle for Poets and
the Poetry-Curious
This bundle includes two products: an ebook version of the class How to Write a Poem Every Day, and Finding Guideposts for Your Writing (a recorded video presentation with accompanying workbook).
How to Write a Poem Every Day
Explore the poetic landscape with How to Write a Poem Every Day’s 21-day writing challenge. Fill your toolbox with techniques along the way, gaining new methods to work and play with words, including when you feel completely uninspired. The course is designed to help you come up with a draft in an hour or less. Sometimes writing prompts can be very specific, meaning that poems created from them will inevitably be very similar. Not in this course: each prompt will be a technique you can use over and over to create an infinite number of infinitely varied poems.
First we’ll deepen our poetic seeing and listening, and we’ll then finish with a tour of strangeness, shaking up the idea of what it means to write a poem. It’s intended to ease in the beginner (the first exercise is taken from a book on teaching elementary school students to write poetry), but even experienced writers are likely to discover some new possibilities and exercises they haven’t seen before.
What might it mean for you to have 21 new poems? Or to know that, even if you feel uninspired, you can sit down for a little while and come up with a poem? An imperfect poem, but a poem.
Finding Guideposts for Your Writing
Then with Finding Guideposts for Your Writing, explore your inner frontiers through a series of exercises that will help you more deeply understand your relationship with your readers, and consider what writing pace aligns with your strengths, your resources, and your writing career goals. The accompanying workbook guides you through all the exercises in the talk and links to a number of resources and references (both free and paid) to help you go deeper. It’s potentially useful to all kinds of writers, not just poets, and includes examples and resources for prose writers.
A few of the more unusual exercises in this unique resource include:
- The Book Cover Test
- Writing Your Writer Biography
- Audiences of Connection and Audiences of Ambition
This talk lays the groundwork for an upcoming course called Poetry Revision Lab. “Finding Guideposts for Your Writing” is a fancy title for a framework that I first called “poetic goal setting,” which I think is a key preliminary step that guides the revision process. If revision is the way we make our poems the best we can, first we need to know what “the best” is. I believe we’re in a place to make solid decisions about how to change our poems (and how much time to give them) when we have a specific idea of the kind of poet we want to be. We have to be able to see more clearly what path we’re on.
Creator: Meg Hartmann