What Poems Want Reading and Revising with Care

When giving feedback about poems, we’re often asked to point out what’s “working” and what’s “not working” and discuss revisions that would make poems “stronger.” But what would it mean to enter a different kind of relationship with our writing—one in which we let the poem itself guide us to what it needs? In this revision-based craft class, we’ll see what happens when we try to ask: “What does the poem want?” We will look at poems that seem to have holes, hungers, and unrequited loves baked in, and practicing listening for their desires. We’ll try out a few revision exercises that try to be in conversation with poems rather than “fixing” them. And we’ll discuss what it might mean to engage with writing (ours and others’) through an ethics of care.

Join Straw Dog Writers Guild and poet Franny Choi at the Lilly Library in Florence for this craft workshop, “What Poems Want: Reading & Revising with Care” on Saturday, September 28 from 1:00-2:30pm. No registration necessary.

This workshop is for anyone who is feeling stuck on their writing and/or is interested in considering a new approach to revision! Participants should bring 3-4 poem drafts that they would like to work on (the less “polished” the better).

Franny Choi is a poet & essayist whose books include The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, 2022), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). Franny’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. Franny is the current Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA and the founder of Brew & Forge. She has two books forthcoming: a collection of essays about robots, and an anthology, We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word, co-edited with Terisa Siagatonu, No‘u Revilla, and Bao Phi. Franny is Faculty in Literature at Bennington College.