Debrief on June 21-27 at Community of Writers Poetry Week Conference in Olympic Valley: Part 1

 

The Community of Writers has been gathering in Olympic Valley for over 50 years, offering workshop weeks in Poetry in June and Creative Non-Fiction/Fiction in July. Last week I was fortunate to attend my fourth week at the Poetry Conference over many years, the first time I attended happening back in 2007 I believe. 

The Poetry Program at the Community of Writers is founded on the belief that when poets gather in a community to write new poems, each poet may well break through old habits and write something stronger and truer than before. To help this happen we work together to create an atmosphere in which everyone might feel free to try anything. - Community of Writers

Around 75 poets lived, ate, wrote, and discussed poetry together for the week, our goal being to compose a new and hopefully habit-breaking poem to share in workshop each morning. This program is a little different from other poetry workshops in that we don't share work we've already written and revised and spent time considering. The poems I shared each day were ideas and sounds and words and forms that I had spent much less than 24 hours on, sometimes only 90 minutes of writing. 

It was exhilarating to devote 3 or 4 hours each day, usually in the afternoon after lunch and before our evening craft talks, drafting lines. And then after dinner, returning to the poem-making late into the night or early morning. Sometimes I would sleep on the poem at some point, and shift things around in the morning before I submitted it to workshop.

But what is truly unique at CoW is the workshop style, something we all daily renew our surprise at how well it works to encourage experimentation and generating new work. In workshop, the Faculty poets (Pulitzer prize winners, experts in crafts and history, kind collaborators) guide the group in noting and excavating the places in the poems where wonderful emotion, image, juxtaposition, startling moves, original detail, and creative form build the experience of a poem on the page. Jane Miller calls certain types of openings in a poem "hinges," like in a book where the spine opens, to reveal yet another meaning in the poem. 

Meanings layer on meanings. This past week our poems wrestled with intersecting the poetic with the experience today of illegal and evil violence against our people, our communities, our health, our education, our science, our planet.

I collected a few books by the faculty and here are three books on the craft of writing poetry by Jane Miller, Brenda Hillman (the Director of CoW), and Forrest Gander. I love reading books on craft that reveal the brilliant minds of the author.