Description
Eight Wednesdays, Mar 12-Apr 30, 5:45-7:45pm
Open to all
Limited to 12 participants
Hybrid Workshop*
This workshop engages poetry through a listening practice.
Listening shifts attention away from prosaic sense-making and toward poetic meaning-making. Through listening, we can quiet our inner editorial voice, make unexpected leaps of thought, create new patterns of association, and attune to the fullness—the timbre, tone, and sway—of any given moment.
Developing a listening practice also carves out dedicated time, space, and attention for writing. Listening permits an encounter between you and your voice, which emerges when you do not self-consciously construct it. Listening halts self-critical chatter, allowing you to tune in to your natural rhythms, embodied knowledge, and inner language.
You will be invited to engage in a directed listening experience, on your own time, before each workshop. During this experience, you will compose the poems that will be brought into workshop, which will be spent reading new poems aloud and providing feedback on one another’s writing. The idea is that you will bring in new work during each session to share, with writing taking place on your own time. Consequently, this is a writing-intensive workshop. Short readings and audio files will be assigned, and participants will need a recording device for one exercise (phone is OK).
The workshop will fully engage the intellect and life experiences of all the writers in the room as we talk shop about craft, poetics, and more. New work is privileged to demonstrate the limitless potential we have within us to create poetry—the potential to hear poetry in everyday life.
*This workshop will take place at the QWF Office (Room 3, 1200 Atwater Avenue, Westmount, Quebec) with up to 2 virtual spots for participants who are unable to attend in-person because of distance or disability. By default, all workshop registrations are for in-person spots. If you can’t attend in person and would like to request a virtual slot, contact Riley at riley@qwf.org and wait for confirmation before registering. Please do not register until after you receive confirmation that there is a virtual spot for you.
