Poetry Writing Workshop!

I will be leading a midday (for those slackers out there like me who don't have a day job, this is perfect!) writers workshop in a couple of weeks at The Cell Theater.

The Cell: http://www.thecelltheatre.org/?p=projects

Fridays, 2-5:30pm.

A description of the workshop:


Workshop Location: The Cell Theater, NYC
Workshop Dates: February 20, 27, March 6, 13, 20, 27 *
Workshop Time: 3-5:30 pm
*Final reading featuring participants from the workshop to be announced later

About the workshop:

This poetry workshop is designed to facilitate creative thinking about our own lives in a historical and cultural context. Our today is history, tomorrow. Participants will be given select poems each week and asked to react to each piece through annotation, notes, or by beginning to compose lines for their own poems. Each meeting we will discuss artifacts (documents, pictures, music, artwork, etc) brought in that speak directly to the week's topic. There will be occasions to take the workshop out of the meeting space and into the rich cultural and historical surroundings, and use the observations as a springboard for creating and writing poems. In addition to making several nods towards writers long ago working in this art form, participants will be introduced to several contemporary multicultural poets who deal in and out of form, who write poems that rhyme or are far from it, but whose focus is to tell a story for tomorrow. We will consider the role of poetry as not only a vehicle of expression, but of impression – how one can allow a piece of creative writing to make a personal (or global) cultural and historical statement.

The purpose of this workshop is to garner a critical and creative lens towards writing and reading poetry, with the hopes that it will push the writer/reader to demand more. The space created by workshop participants and leaders will be one of comfort and safety – no attacks made on an individual person, culture, heritage, orientation will be tolerated.

Structure of the workshop: The first half of the class will be spent in discussion. We will discuss artifacts, poems, history, culture, etc. The second half will be spent workshopping and offering constructive critiques to individual poems brought in. Participants whose poems will be critiqued must be e-mailed to the instructor on _______________, prior to the workshop meeting.

Not a poet?! Not a problem. This workshop is to use poetry as a tool, a way of seeing. It is for all levels of writers – beginners to advanced. Our aim is to build an appreciation for poetry – by both reading and writing poems – while enriching our literary lives together. Some techniques discovered in the workshop will be able to cross over into fiction, non-fiction/personal essays/memoir and playwriting. Come and build with a community.

Participants will receive copies of the selected poems.


Guidelines:
E-mail five pages of poems (or five pages of your own writing if you do not self-identify as a poet) along with a very brief statement (in a single Microsoft Word document) about what you plan to accomplish in the workshop. Include contact info. Deliver to: delanaradameron @ gmail.com

DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 15, 2009 11:59PM


Workshop Leader
A native of Columbia, South Carolina, DéLana R.A. Dameron is the author of How God Ends Us, a collection of poems chosen by Elizabeth Alexander for the 2008 South Carolina Poetry Book Prize (University of South Carolina Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, PoemMemoirStory, 42opus, African American Review, Pembroke Magazine, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review among others. She is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and Soul Mountain, and is a member of the Carolina African American Writer's Collective. A longtime lover of the intersections of history and literature, she holds a B.A. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dameron currently resides in New York City.