Together we will cultivate an attunement to the sensory world, find the spaces where language can propel itself through silence, and sharpen our incisors on the formal elements that make poetry ring clearly and beautifully.
We will be reading to see what we can glean from other poet’s successes, with a particular eye to their use of image, sound, and prosody, rhythm, voice and tone, breaks in lines and stanzas, and other elements of form. As a community of writers coming to poetry, we will practice being good first readers for each other’s fledgling drafts. We’ll also approach revision together, finding ways to scratch closer and closer to our poems’ best final forms, and each workshop participant will receive written editorial critiques on their poems with suggestions for how to move forward.
We’ll write with the presumption that somewhere and somehow, we’ll have readers and listeners for our work. To that end, we’ll also approach how to get poems into print, how to decide where to aim when trying to publish, and how to read and perform our own poems so that they’re as live for our audiences as they are in our own minds..
Born and raised in the Gulf South, Georgia Pearle is an alumna of Smith College and holds an MFA in Poetry from Lesley University. She has been a coordinator of the VIDA Count, the digital editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, and the recipient of the Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize in Creative Writing. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Terrain.org, WSQ, and others, and are forthcoming with Ninth Letter and Crab Orchard Review. She is in her final year as a Doctoral Fellow in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston, where she holds a CLASS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. She is at work on a collection of poems as well as a memoir. www.gpearle.com