This is the first of three poetry writing workshops with Michael Metivier. Attendance can be in person or by Zoom. Please contact Jared Jenisch at jared.jenisch@thehowe.org to reserve a spot. Attendance is limited to 12.

What do we need when we sit down (or lie back, or hold onto the steering wheel, or…) to write a poem? Do we require something Deep™ or Important© or Heavy® to say? These three workshops will emphasize play, experimentation, and ways to get at the truth, but slant, as Emily Dickinson might say. In other words, the goal will be participants to write poems that surprise themselves, for if the writer is not surprised, then the reader will not be, either.

September: Tact

We will look at a couple brief passages from poet W. D. Snodgrass’s lecture “Tact and the Poet’s Force,” and discuss his observation of how poems can draw power from “crucial words or phrases that are never spoken.” How do we employ such tact in our writing, and how can this help us conceive of poems as processes of discovery rather than commandments? We will read a couple of tactful poems and devise structures for in-class writing.

Michael Metivier is a writer, an editor, a musician, and a lexicographer. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, the Bennington Review, and the African American Review, among other journals and publications. Columba, a quarterly, published his long poem “Glacial, Erratic” in 2022 as part of a split chapbook with poet Erín Moure. Metivier lives with his wife and daughters in Windsor, Vermont, and is an editor at Merriam-Webster (http://michaelmetivier.com/).