24PearlStreet Workshops and Events
Often, a poem has its own intentions that are at odds with the intentions of the poet. The poet will begin the poem with a certain aim, feeling, perspective, or subject, only to find that the poem veers into unknown territory. Often the preferred method of revision is to ‘correct’ the poem by deleting or pruning the extraneous material. Rather than suggesting this material be deleted from the text as extraneous, the premise of this workshop is that eruptions of material into the poem, recognizable by the liveliness or difficulty of the language, mark the real appearance of the poem. We will learn how to recognize these eruptions and how to revise toward them to make our work take on new life. Workshop participants are encouraged to bring work with them, particularly ‘problem’ poems or poems that have resisted efforts at revision. We will also have writing exercises to generate new work.
Biography
Rebecca Seiferle’s poems are forthcoming in Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry in early 2024 from Green Linden Press. She has published four poetry collections. Wild Tongue (Copper Canyon) won the Grub Street National Book Prize in Poetry. Her three previous collections, Bitters, The Music We Dance To and The Ripped-Out Seam won the Western States Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, The National Writer’s Union Prize, and the Poets & Writers Exchange Award. Seiferle is also a noted translator, having translated César Vallejo’s The Black Heralds (Copper Canyon) and Trilce (Sheep Meadow Press). She was Jacob Ziskind poet-in-residence at Brandeis University, and a visiting writer at Vanderbilt University, Hamilton College, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Key West Literary Seminars, the Summer Literary Seminars in Lithuania, StAnza International Poetry Festival in St. Andrews, Scotland, among others. She was the recipient of the Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. From 2012-2016 Seiferle was Tucson Poet Laureate and she was awarded an Arizona Commission on the Arts Research and Development Grant in 2019.
