Find Your Poetry Muse: A Seven Week Creative Journey Online Course 2020

Please note: this course is full. Please click here to be placed on our waiting list.

Online Course Info:

This is a seven-week online course that features Monday LIVE Zoom guided workshops with sample poems, writing prompts, Q&A, and weekly assignments. On Fridays, there will be another LIVE session, for group workshopping of poems.

If you are unable to attend any of the Monday presentations, recordings will be made available for you as soon as possible. All writers will have access to the recordings in our virtual classroom for 30 days following the end of the course. There will not be a recording of the Friday poetry workshopping.

Live sessions will be held at 2 pm EST on Mondays (10/5, 10/12, 10/19, 10/26, 11/2, 11/9, 11/16) and at 2 pm EST on Fridays (10/9, 10/16, 10/23, 10/30, 11/6, 11/13, 11/20). Monday sessions will be recorded and placed in the virtual classroom. Friday sessions will not be recorded. To get the most from this hands-on course, please attend all classes, unless an emergency prevents you from attending.

Online Workshop Participant Cap:

16 students.

What You’ll Learn & Experience:

Poet Gail Carson Levine will help you find ways to grow your craft, sharpen your voice, and expand your poetic and creative boundaries. You’ll participate in guided workshops, intended to ignite your inner muse through discussion, lecture, and generative writing exercises. You’ll try out forms, like ghazals and triolets, and poetic approaches, like narrative, political, and lyric poems. Your own work will be informed by wonderful poems by established poets. Replenish and restore with this creative journey that will focus on the poetic form itself, not tied to one reader or group.

As writers of books for children and teens, we seek ways to grow our craft, sharpen our voice, and reach for magic and muse wherever we can find them. In this intensive, writers will stretch and grow to embrace many poetic forms…and even meet a muse or two!

Attend If:

• You could use a creative stretch. The exercises, discussions and lectures in this course will help you expand your creative boundaries.
• You’re working on a novel in verse. Maybe you’re a novelist who’s decided to try their next project as a novel in verse. The exercises and lectures offered in this course will help you!
• You could benefit from some structure as you grow. With Gail as your creative guide, you will unlock new words and spark new pathways.

Preliminary Agenda

Live sessions will be held at 2 pm EST on Mondays (10/5, 10/12, 10/19, 10/26, 11/2, 11/9, 11/16) and at 2 pm EST on Fridays (10/9, 10/16, 10/23, 10/30, 11/6, 11/13, 11/20). Monday sessions will be recorded and placed in the virtual classroom. Friday sessions will not be recorded. To get the most from this hands-on course, please attend all classes, unless an emergency prevents you from attending.

Please note: all times are EST.
Week 1
October 5, 2 pm (approximately 1.5 hours)
LIVE Zoom session: Getting to Know Our Poets: introductions and overview of workshop, sample poems, give assignment #1, and Q & A.

October 7
Submissions DUE

October 9, 2pm
LIVE Zoom session: Workshopping poems: Group discussion of poems

Week 2
October 12, 2 pm (approximately 45 minutes to 1 hour)
LIVE Zoom session: sample poems, give assignment #2, and brief Q & A

October 14
Submissions DUE

October 16, 2pm
LIVE Zoom session: Workshopping poems: Group discussion of poems

Week 3
October 19, 2 pm (approximately 45 minutes to 1 hour)
LIVE Zoom session: sample poems, give assignment #3, and brief Q & A

October 21
Submissions DUE

October 23, 2pm
LIVE Zoom session: Workshopping poems: Group discussion of poems

Week 4
October 26, 2 pm (approximately 45 minutes to 1 hour)
LIVE Zoom session: sample poems, give assignment #4, and brief Q & A

October 28
Submissions DUE

October 30, 2pm
LIVE Zoom session: Workshopping poems: Group discussion of poems

Week 5
November 2, 2 pm (approximately 45 minutes to 1 hour)
LIVE Zoom session: sample poems, give assignment #5, and brief Q & A

November 4
Submissions DUE

November 6, 2pm
LIVE Zoom session: Workshopping poems: Group discussion of poems

Week 6
November 9, 2 pm (approximately 45 minutes to 1 hour)
LIVE Zoom session: sample poems, give assignment #6, and brief Q & A

November 11
Submissions DUE

November 13, 2pm
LIVE Zoom session: Workshopping poems: Group discussion of poems

Week 7
November 16, 2 pm (approximately 45 minutes to 1 hour)
LIVE Zoom session: Revision techniques and tips, no assignment given

November 18
Submissions DUE

November 20, 2pm
LIVE Zoom session: Final celebration and CHOICE POEM discussion

Resources

Sample exercise: A Writing Exercise to Ignite Your Inner Muse
5 Ways to Reclaim Your Creative Joy
Step Away From Your Manuscript & Shake Things Up With Writers’ Bingo
Breaking Through Those Creative Blocks

From Gail: books about writing poems:

• The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms, edited by Ron Padgett
• The Practice of Poetry, Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach, edited by Robin Behn & Chase Twichell
• The Art of the Poetic Line by James Longenbach
• The Poet’s Companion by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux
• The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser

Testimonials

“Gail is an accomplished poet and writer, but she also has the gift to teach, encourage, and inspire. She made many forms of poetry accessible to us through example, through readings and discussions of form, and through our attempts. She responded to our work constructively, brilliantly, which gave me the courage to write and to share with the group. 5 STARS!”

“I learned so much about poetic meter and how it can be used in my prose writing, as well as in writing poetry.”