Free-Writing Your Way into a Poem
This will be a generative workshop for NEPC members based on a technique I’ve been using for 20 years that I learned from my mentor and dear friend, Babara Helfgott Hyett. Many (most?) of my poems begin as free-writes generated during a weekly (now virtual) session with poet-friends.Come with whatever notebook or journal you like to write in, a pen or pencil, and three phrases, sentence fragments, or sentences you’d like to use as prompts. These can come from any source: an encyclopedia entry, a single line of a poem (please use the full line), a Victorian novel you picked up at the library sale and have never read. Pick lines that are open ended and evocative. Some lines I’ve used recently: “Tell yourself, maybe it’s true. Maybe your name was . . .” (Nick Flynn); “I missed the storms that stopped there” (Carl Phillips); “and break forever– (unknown); “Are they born knowing?” (The How and Why Program: Little Questions that Lead to Great Discoveries, copyright 1947). We will take turns providing prompts, writing for an amount of time that will likely surprise you, and reading what we’ve written back to one another.
Wendy Drexler’s third poetry collection, Before There Was Before, was published by Iris Press in 2017. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, J Journal, Lily Poetry Review, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Sugar House, The Atlanta Review, The Mid-American Review, The Hudson Review, The Threepenny Review, and the Valparaiso Poetry Review, among others. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily and WBUR’s Cognoscenti; and in numerous anthologies. She’s been the poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, since 2018, and is programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club.Members can email info@nepoetryclub.org for the link.
*If you’re not a member, joining is easy!
https://nepoetryclub.org/membership/