2018 Massachusetts Poetry Festival

In this program, participants will bring in a poem that they are having trouble writing-- or a finished poem that they don't mind playing around with-- and utilize various strategies to recreate the poem through the voice of a fictional or historical character. Participants will exercise creative constraint as they utilize only the words and images this persona would have at their disposal to retell the story of their poem. As a model, participants will be looking at two poems by Marie Howe “The Boy” and “Gretel from a Sudden Clearing” to see the ways in which a fictional persona can unlock a poem for the writer and reader.