Workshop: Poetry
POETRY WITH BETSY SHOLL
Engaging with the World in Our Poems with Betsy Sholl
Driving on the turnpike once I saw a tiny canvas and easel set up on a broad open hillside with no painter anywhere in sight. There are so many ways the invisible painter might have worked–with realism, surrealism, or abstraction, with concrete detail, close up, or a wide-angled view.
In the fraught time we are living in, how do we get the world in our poems? That’s what this workshop will explore: ways of engaging the world and our own unique relationship to it, how to balance inner and outer worlds, what styles and devices might help. We will read and write new drafts, but each participant should bring at least one poem that she or he wants to revise in fresh ways.
+ SUBMIT Participants are asked to please submit in advance three pages and up to three poems; i.e. one three-page poem, three one-page poems, etc. Email the manuscript no later than 9:00 a.m. on October 8 to director@mainewriters.org with the subject line: “POETRY MSS.”
Betsy Sholl served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011. Her ninth collection of poetry is House of Sparrows, New and Selected Poems (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). Otherwise Unseeable won the 2015 Maine Literary Award for poetry. Other awards include the AWP Prize for Poetry, the Felix Pollak Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and two Maine Individual Artists Grants. She currently teaches in the MFA Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives in Portland, Maine.