Workshop: Poetry
Power & potential
A Poetry Workshop with Christian Barter
This workshop will be oriented toward critique and revision, with a secondary focus on new writing generated by prompts.
Group discussion will be aimed at finding the power and potential in participants’ drafts—not so much on “fixing” poems as bringing forward the life and meaning that asked to be made a poem in the first place. As a workman, and a builder of trails in the very place this workshop is being held, I am especially interested in how workman-like processes (like cutting, rearranging and rewording) can transform poem drafts.
SUBMIT
Participants are asked to submit drafts of three (3) poems of up to one page in length each.
Please submit these materials by no later than 9:00 a.m. on April 26. Please email the manuscripts as attachments to programs@mainewriters.org with the subject line: “Barter BLACK FLY MSS.” *Word files are preferred, but you may also send a PDF.
Christian Barter is the author of three books of poetry: In Someone Else’s House, winner of the 2014 Maine Literary Award; The Singers I Prefer, a Lenore Marshall Prize finalist; and Bye-Bye Land, winner of the Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions. His poetry appears widely in such places as Ploughshares, The Literary Review, Epoch, Georgia Review, and The American Scholar, and has been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Daily, and PBS Newshour. He has been a resident fellow at Yaddo and The McDowell Colony, and a Hodder Fellow in poetry at Princeton University. For more than 25 years, he has worked as a stone worker, rigger, arborist, equipment operator, and supervisor at Acadia National Park, where he served as the first-ever Poet Laureate