In this 6-week workshop, we will write poems that celebrate and critique life in the city, with a special emphasis on San Antonio and its environs. This workshop is open to writers with various degrees of experience in poetry and will focus on crafting poems for the page with an emphasis on exploring poetic forms. Guest poets, including Natalia Treviño, John Olivares Espinoza, Clemonce Heard, and Emmy Pérez, will visit the course both in-person and virtually to discuss craft issues.
In this workshop, we will explore in-depth how to find our poetic voice. We will discuss the elements of the poetic voice such as speaker, diction, syntax, rhythm, tone and various other characteristics. In addition, we will study ways we can stretch and challenge our use of poetic voice. Finally, we will apply four questions that will reveal our own poetic voice.
What brings a poem from a first-person narrative, to what has been termed Confessional poetry? Looking at poems by groundbreaking poets Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton, and Ai, we will explore how these women poets broke through barriers of sex and language, how they shaped their work, and, using their examples, we will break through our own boundaries. A packet will be sent to participants before the workshop, with poems from each of the poets and background information of their eras, along with suggestions for our own writing. Each participant will write 3 poems, inspired by each of these Confessional poets, and poems by participants will be read carefully and discussed.
