Boston Book Festival

Would you like some new fuel for your poetic engine? Or could you use a jump start? Please join award-winning poet Charles Coe, a faculty member at the Newport MFA program, for a fun, relaxed workshop that will offer tools and strategies for generating new poetic ideas. Come spend an hour at "serious play."

Join two of the coeditors of a new poetry anthology, Braving the Body (Harbor Editions, 2024) that Dawn Lundy Martin calls “astonishing.” Martin states, “after these 116 poems—at times achingly visceral, at others necessarily light-filled—you’ll wonder how you ever thought a body was a thing you knew.” Pichchenda Bao and Jennifer Franklin will lead participants through generative writing prompts inspired by a series of poems in the anthology by Diane Seuss, Ellen Bass, Fred Marchant, Martha Collins, Iain Haley Pollock, Kim Addonizio, and Caridad Moro-Gronlier.

Led by award-winning poet and spoken word artist Jarvis Subia, author of Hello Joy (Black Lawrence Press), this workshop will explore the range of joy inside our writing. We will utilize exercises such as a writing prompt, board pallets, and group discussion to execute this session. We will read poets Jose Olivarez and Ariana Brown to take a closer look at their perspectives on joy, All culminating in writing an ode to the things which bring us joy. This will mostly consist of generative writing and group discussion of poetry.

Poets Anthony Walton and Heather Treseler will guide participants in a revision workshop, drawing from Ellen Bryant Voigt’s observation that a poem is “not the transcription but the transformation of experience.” They will lead participants in implementing concrete revision strategies from poets such as Frank Bidart, Elizabeth Bishop, Michael S. Harper, Robert Hass, Molly Peacock, and Mark Strand. The workshop leaders believe that revision is the key to poetic practice, a set of tools that can be learned and honed, and will provide specific rubrics, so that participants can crack open their poem drafts and locate what is not yet on the page.