9 Thursdays, Jan. 28 thru March 24, 7-9:30 p.m. San Francisco
$365 members/$395 others Cancellation Policy
Testimonials for Julie
“It’s not where you take things from–it’s where you take them to.”–Jean-Luc Godard
A good workshop sends its members home with ideas and strategies for revision, but new (and not-so-new) poets often find revising difficult on their own: they keep accumulating fresh work without finishing what they’ve begun.
This workshop will look at participant poems in successive drafts, so everybody can aim to finish 1, 2, or even 5 poems over 9 weeks. “This will let us explore the truly creative aspects of revision,” says instructor Julie Bruck, “the deeper work that can be harder to find time for during classes that focus on generating new material every week.
Participants will bring a fresh draft of their chosen poem in each week (or every other week, depending on class size), until they feel they’ve cracked whatever problem the poem presents, or are simply ready to move on. The only prerequisite, says Julie, is that “the poem be one the writer is open to changing. We’ll discuss the ways in which poems let us know what they need, and with luck, move from the requisite frustration with a “stuck” piece, to the real-live creative exhilaration as a poem discovers itself in revision.
“We’ll also spend some class time discussing essays on revision, as well as successive drafts by well-known poets. Who knew, for example, that Elizabeth Bishop’s perfect villanelle, “One Art,” started out as such a god-awful mess? Isn’t it comforting to discover that the poem actually got even worse before it got better?
NOTE: Julie also teaches our 9-week Fearless Poetry Workshop (which will be offered again in the Spring Session).
Julie Bruck is the author of three books of poetry from Canada’s Brick Books, Monkey Ranch (2012), The End of Travel (1999), and The Woman Downstairs (1993). Her work has appeared in such magazines as Ms, Ploughshares, and The New Yorker, and her awards include two Gold Canadian National Magazine Awards, and the 2012 Governor General’s Award for poetry (the Canadian equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize, folks!) A former Montrealer, she has lived in San Francisco since 1997, and has taught poetry workshops for the Writing Salon for nine years. For more information: http://www.juliebruck.com.