First Tuesdays: Themed Monthly Poetry Workshop SDWI

While the poetry we write starts as a conversation with the Self, it inevitably becomes a conversation with Other Poets. If we are lucky, that conversation extends itself in front of an audience of Enthusiastic Readers. Come up out of your basement, down from your gable, or away from that crowded coffee shop you frequent. Bring paper, pencil, and your device. Let’s partake of all three conversations and write together.

This workshop is for anyone afflicted with an insatiable urge to write poems. (poetry fever and anyone excited to try new forms and assignments.) We meet the first Tuesday of every month. While we will read and write poems based on a particular theme each month, I invite you to rebel and write the poems hunting you if the themes don’t suit you (though I believe out of the bedrock of resistance emerges some of our most feral, inspired poetry).

Expect to read poetry out loud, write and workshop poems, share ideas for potential submission targets, and grow as a poet. You will come away from each of our classes with enough assignments and started drafts to keep you busy during the month apart til our next meeting. This is an ongoing workshop; themes include:

June/Mothers and Fathers
July/Travel
August/Harvest
September/Animals
October/Music
November/The Human Body
December/Nature
January/Outer Space
February/Love
March/Weather
April/Spirituality

This is an in person workshop offered at San Diego Writers, Ink on the First Tuesday of every month starting on Tuesday, June 7 at NTC, Liberty Station.

Cost is $30 for members or $36 for non-members per month; to register, visit 1st Tuesdays: Theme, Set, Go.

June 1 update:

Our first meeting is devoted to fathers and mothers (considering the roles from multiple points of view). If you’ve worked with me in the past you know I delight in bringing out the best you have to give your poems in the way of vulnerable grit. I only ask that you go the distance in your process to arrive somewhere you haven’t been before. All level of writer welcome.

A few selections I’ll be reading before we begin writing together include First Lesson by Philip Booth, “Lie back, daughter, let your head / be tipped back in the cup of my hand…” and Thom Gunn’s Baby Song, “From the private ease of Mother’s womb / I fall into the lighted room.” Also Dorothy Parker’s Prayer for a New Mother, “The things she knew, let her forget again— / The voices in the sky, the fear, the cold…” and by Linda Pastan, Marks, “My husband gives me an A / For last night’s supper.” Please bring your own favorite poem to read on the topic of mothers and fathers, roll up your sleeves, join me, and bring a friend. What a way to kick off summer!

Rest of post at Feral Mom, Feral Writer: Tarot Prompts and Musings and a June Poetry Workshop