From Prompt to Poetry: Write! with Anita Skeen – G25070310
In this workshop we’ll slow down and examine the steps we go through (or should go through) in creating a poem. There are many things that prompt a poem: what are they? Where are they? How do we become attentive to them, and then begin to think about them and turn them from observations into art? We have to pay attention, consciously, to language, sound, structure, form. Then we have to take time to consider our work, and revise. If we are successful in our efforts, we get the poem.
Participants will be given poems to read, to examine, and to discuss, then to use as models for their own writing; we will discuss these in class the following day. Our sequence for progressing will be this: Prompt. Ponder. Process. Pause. Poem, or what I think of as The Five Stages of Poetry. All levels of experience are welcomed from those who have never attempted a poem to those who have published widely.
Instructor
-
Anita SkeenAnita Skeen is currently Professor Emerita in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University where she is the Founding Director of The Center for Poetry. and currently the Series Editor for Wheelbarrow Books. She taught students in kindergarten through high school while working with the Kansas Arts Commission’s Artist in the Schools Program; in traditional venues such as college classrooms as a Visiting Writer and Writer in Residence; and in senior citizens’ centers, libraries, and at Ghost Ranch. She has been the Coordinator of the Creative Arts Program at Ghost Ranch for 41 years, and the Fall Writing Festival for 23 years.
Anita is the author of six volumes of poetry: Each Hand A Map (1986); Portraits (1990); Outside the Fold, Outside the Frame (1999); The Resurrection of the Animals (2002); Never the Whole Story (2011); When We Say Shelter (2007), with Oklahoma poet Jane Taylor; and The Unauthorized Audubon (2014), a collection of poems about imaginary birds accompanied by the linocuts of anthropologist/visual artist Laura B. DeLind.. With Taylor, she co-edited the literary anthology Once Upon A Place: Writings from Ghost Ranch (2008). Her poetry, short fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies.