20/20 Revision: Using Instinct, Found Poetry, and Fragments in Rewriting and Transforming Your Poems with Michael Tyrell (via Zoom)

When it comes to revision habits, Time and Procrastination don’t need to be your worst enemies. Sometimes the best thing to do after you’ve written a draft is to put it immediately aside–and then not come back to it for many moons, even years! This workshop will seek to bring new light and energy to old pieces of writing, including really rough drafts, poems you’ve given up on, false starts, and work that others told you was unfixable. Through a series of exercises, including carving out found poetry, we will make new arrangements, rescue from the fire lines that we thought couldn’t be saved, and look for the hidden pulse and elusive structures within work that’s been collecting dust in notebooks or hiding somewhere in the circuits of your laptop. The emphasis won’t be just about polishing and perfecting, but also figuring out what poems and possibilities lurk inside an existing poem. What new questions and shapes arise when we look at and invest renewed faith in writing we’ve been avoiding forever?

NB: This class will be taught on Zoom and will be capped at 15 students. Registrants will receive the Zoom link to the email address they use to register. It will arrive immediately after registration so please check your spam folder if you do not receive it. It will also be sent the day before class as a reminder. Please review the course policies page before registering for any classes. Please email misty@writerscenter.org with any questions.

All HVWC scholarship applications will be available on Dec 1 and will be due on Dec 15 for all winter/spring 2024 classes.

Michael Tyrell is the author of the poetry collection The Wanted (National Poetry Review Press, 2012). With Julia Spicher Kasdorf, he edited the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU Press, 2007). His poems have appeared in Agni, Iowa Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and many other magazines. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he teaches at NYU.