2018 Massachusetts Poetry Festival

Are there particular words that seem more effective when writing about a particular setting? D. H. Lawrence once wrote, “All creative art must rise out of a specific soil and flicker with the spirit of place.” In her poem, “Point Shirley,” Sylvia Plath creates a densely sonic evocation of the specific soil (in this case sand and rocks) of her grandparents’ home on a “shingle” (a stony beach) in Winthrop, Massachusetts. In this workshop, we’ll study the associative power and musical effects (including assonance, alliteration, and onomatopoeia) of the word choices Plath uses to recreate the sounds and textures of the land-and-seascape of Point Shirley. Participants will choose a place, real or imagined, and be prompted to come up with a vocabulary that might inform, texturally and sonically, that location. Participants will then compose a draft of a poem located in that setting that uses the chosen words.