Supercharging Your Poetic Voice
9:00 am to Noon - Poetry WordShop
Let’s begin with the basics. To be a poet, you have to have the mind of a poet, which is actually the same as the mind of anyone who is original and creative. The mind of the physicist and the chef and the cinematographer are the same. Poets have the same mind they do; it just so happens that poets write poems. Got it? Okay, then let’s talk about three things that are true about every poem that has ever been written. Here they are: all poems begin small, a poem is a combination of the deliberate and the accidental, and a small beginning plus lots of time results in a great poem. If these sound a little abstract, don’t worry, because you’ll be given lots of examples and have ample opportunity to discuss these basic elements of poetry with your instructors.
And away we go! In the second half of the workshop, we’ll attack at warp speed the many ways you can make your poems bigger, stronger, louder, more impactful. Are your poems concrete and narrative or are they more elusive and imagistic? Do you use long lines or short lines? Is your poetic vocabulary plain and simple or is it ornate and convoluted? Do you write about your own backyard or the whole wide world? How are your choices affected by the time and place in which they are written? How is the subject matter a part of the greater poetic voice? Do you write about family? Travel? Marvel characters? How are diction, syntax, line, and verse a part of your voice? How do you use repetition (assonance, alliteration, rhyme, anaphora, images, etc.)?
In this workshop we’ll be using every trick in the book to help you develop your biggest, most vibrant, most powerful poetic voice.
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Barbara Hamby has just finished her new book Burn, which is forthcoming in 2025. She is the author of seven other books of poems, most recently Holoholo (2021), Bird Odyssey (2018), and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published Babel (2004) and All-Night Lingo Tango (2009). Her first book, Delirium, won the Vassar Miller Prize, The Kate Tufts Award, and the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. Her second book, The Alphabet of Desire, won the New York University Press Prize for Poetry and was published in 1999 by New York University Press. She was a 2010 Guggenheim fellow in Poetry, and her book of short stories, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, won the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Yale Review, and The New York Times. Born in New Orleans, she teaches at Florida State University. |
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David Kirby teaches at Florida State University. His latest books are The Winter Dance Party, Poems 1983-2023 and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them. Kirby is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense” and which was named one of Booklist’s Top 10 Black History Non-Fiction Books of 2010. Entertainment Weekly has called Kirby’s poetry one of “5 Reasons to Live.” In 2016, Kirby received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Florida Humanities, which called him "a literary treasure of our state." He is currently on the board of Alice James Books. A native of Baton Rouge, he is the recipient of the 2024 Louisiana Writer Award, the 25th writer chosen to receive annual recognition. |