A weekend of workshops! Workshops are limited to fifteen participants. You must register for the festival to register for a workshop.
P@RT 2025 Workshop Descriptions (More TBA!)
When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, Go by a Road You Don’t Know with Mark Doty
When we finish a poem too quickly, the result is often a poem that doesn’t feel as complex and vital as experience does. In this workshop, we’ll use some generative excercises to compose a first draft, then play with some techniques that can help explore, complicate and deepen that initial writing. You’ll gain some new tools to use at home to further your explorations.
Big Sky Begin Again — Life, Death, and What We Can Learn from the Prairie with Gabrielle Calvocoressi
April — the month of gray skies and big blooms. In this class, we will think about beginnings and endings using the flowers, grasses, and birdsong of the Prairie around us to help us think about how we might hold any number of changes in our poems all at once. This is a generative class whose intention is that we all leave with a season’s worth of poems to work on. Let’s begin, end, and bloom together.
Writing toward Light in Dark Times with Kim Stafford
Tropism toward the difficult requires us to face hard truths all around us, but writing releases us from the need to buckle and go down. Poetry can be an implement for spirit levitation of both writer and reader, and a clarifying first step toward right action. First, face what troubles you, then enter the spirit waters of creation to find oxygen. In this workshop we will savor poems that leverage resolve, then write in the musical key of peace.
Obsessions and Inspirations with Joan Logghe
Is it a new love or an old love, a poetic form or travel, A death or birth? Many books today are not just books of poems, but thematic gatherings. Ride the landscape of necessity.
Write and rewrite your obsessions; they contain the psychic energy of beginnings, revision and completion. Sharon Olds’ father or Marie Howe’s brother, the pandemic or Neruda’s Odes or Book of Questions, a sonnet sequence—” Dance me to the End of Love,” Leonard Cohen sings. Well, write to the end of your current love.
Artful Ecology with Cecily Parks
Why do we become attached to places? What can art add to a place, and vice versa? In this craft talk and generative session, we will explore how settings both real and imagined can inspire poetry that draws on techniques we associate with the ekphrastic tradition (which centers works of art) and contemporary ecopoetics (which centers the environment), and how this blending of poetic techniques can not only enliven description but also deepen emotional resonance.
Writing From the I: Transforming the Personal into Poetry with Amanda Johnston
Inspiration is all around us and often comes from our lived experiences. In this workshop, participants will catalog the everyday and extraordinary moments from their lives and learn how to use that source material to create poems that speak to our shared human experience.
Make, Break, and Remake: Revising with Line and Syntax with Hayan Charara
“It wastes a great deal of time,” the late Donald Justice argued, “to fuss much over such minute details as a word here or—in current practice that most slippery of considerations—a line break there.” He even suggested that had he avoided doing so, he would have lived “a happier life.” Dare I disagree with a great like Justice? Yes. The poetic line doesn’t function on its own; it operates in conjunction with other elements in a poem—meter, rhyme, rhythm, syntax, etc. This workshop will have three components: first, a generative writing exercise; second a discussion of syntax and poetic line; and third, a revision exercise that arises out of our discussion. Whether we end up happier, I can’t say. But at the very least, we will have written and revised a poem and fussed much over minute details.
Digital Publishing with Timothy Green and Katie Dozier
The world is changing more rapidly than ever, even as the economic realities of literature become increasingly bleak—but big change brings new opportunities. Katie Dozier and Timothy Green discuss the future of poetry in the emerging digital landscape. The presentation will address the current state of the poetry industry and the benefits of using NFTs and the blockchain to transform the current economy of mass-production into one of collectability. Using examples of their own NFT poems and books, the two will explore the possibilities this technology creates and their vision for a future in which poems gain value as they’re shared more widely and freely.
Impossible Communication: The Letter Poem with David Meischen
A letter poem is neither letter nor poem—but a fusion of both. The word letter opens a gate for the poem; the word poem grants the letter writer transcendent access. In a letter poem, you can address a person no longer breathing, a person you never actually knew, a person from myth or fiction—your cousin, who died forty-three years ago, a woman burned at the stake in Tudor England, the main character in your favorite Dickens novel. In a letter poem, you can also play the ventriloquist—witing to yourself from another point of view. What might a character from your favorite childhood television show say to you? In this workshop, we will read and discuss two or three letter poems. There will be time for drafting.