CRW 4320 Fall2024 - Weise

Although “workshop” is a relatively recent concept started by the New Critics, swapping poems has a rich history. Horace writes about workshopping with a friend: “If Quintilius read a manuscript of yours, he’d say, ‘Please, if you will, change this, and this,’ and if, after you tried and failed to make the corrections he’d advised you to make, he’d tell you to tear it up.” Dickinson pens a letter to her mentor: “Are you too preoccupied to say if my Verse is alive?” Frank O’Hara complains, “I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can’t be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on.” This course joins the legacy of workshop. Focus will be on student poems.