Workshops I: Home and Away

Recognizing and Departing from Habit

Ever notice a repeating vocabulary in your work? We will identify the words we tend to favor in our poems as a starting point for various explorations including: what purpose have our home-base words afforded? what do these words let us know about ourselves? how might poems be made of that recognition itself? what poems have others constructed from this identification? Moving forward, we will think about what forms and focuses might propel the writer into fresher territory. We might “translate” a poem on sight, from a language we don’t know, for instance, or respond to a prompt that requires a number of prescribed words or uses a distracting form. Ultimately, we will consider these questions: what is the experience of leaving the home base of the particularized? And how does this all relate to the experience of writing poems in general? We will discuss the relationship of habit to the writer’s sensibility, and how the reuse of words and themes has the power to deepen or dilute the ambition of the writer.

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