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Poetry Revision Lab

The first Poetry Revision Lab offering has been announced: Finding Guideposts for Your Writing.

This course will be an open-ended exploration of revision, with the course duration to be determined. Possible topics explored may include:

  • Why might one revise? Why might one decide not to revise?
  • Easy revision exercises that will shake up how you’re thinking about your poem and introduce a sense of play to what can sometimes be a very cerebral process.
  • An examination of myths about revision: which ones are useful and which are not-so-helpful, or even toxic?
  • Brenda Hillman’s simple, intuitive revision method, which I couldn’t stop thinking about after I first heard her lecture on it.
  • Russell Edson’s assertion that he didn’t revise, which I once heard him state in a seminar when he visited my MFA program. When challenged by one of the faculty members present that surely he must revise a little, he doubled down and insisted that he did not revise. At all.
  • Famous examples of revision, such as Marianne Moore’s radical changes to previously published work.
  • Detailed examples from my own work about how one poet goes about revising.
  • The role of the reader in the revision process, including what I learned from an education class on writing pedagogy and a book by Seth Godin.
  • Revising vs. rewriting the same poem (sometimes again and again and again).
  • When to decide that you’ll abandon continuing to work on a poem (in other words, declare it “done”).
  • What you can do with poems written long ago (15+ years) that feel like they belong to another person. It’s common advice to put a poem aside for awhile. Can you put a poem aside for too long?
  • What I (as a solo parent to a small child) have learned about how a poet can move her poetry forward when having absolutely 100% zero time (or extremely limited energy).

This course is intended to be the natural next step after How to Write a Poem Every Day (what to do with all these poems??!!).

When: Starting February 2025

Cost: A mix of free and paid offerings

Instructor: Meg Hartmann

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