We caught up with poet and educator Christine Potter as she prepares two poetry workshops for The Sparkle Bookstore's celebration of National Poetry Month. Whether you're a "dabbler" or a professed poet, we hope you'll join us! It's a great way to greet spring.
$10 registration fee, no need to preregister. You receive a $5 coupon for future retail purchases with your registration fee! Waivers available. Please arrive 10 minutes early to register.
Donna:
The Sparkle is excited to welcome you for 2 workshops in April, which is National Poetry Month! The first is "Making It New"and the second is "Good Morning, Good Morning." As a long-time poetry teacher, are these tried and true themes for you?
Christine:
Yes, both of those themes are ones I have explored with students before. I will be doing something in the "Making It New" workshop called mapping, which is actually drawing with crayons (I'll bring the crayons unless you have some in the shop). It disarms new writers and gets them to focus on the specific, and the specific is the enemy of the cliche. We will start out pretending we are seven years old and then we will switch to pens and laptops to write specifically about a thing or event that we remembered. I want to talk about turning off the inner critic to draft also. By the end of the workshop, I'm hoping most people will have a first draft of a free verse poem.
In the second workshop, we will be writing specifically to a theme: waking up in the morning. Poems about that are generally called aubades. Morning, when the mind is clean from a night of dreams, is a great time to write. I will bring in some poems that are specifically morning poems as examples, we will examine their strengths together, and try writing some of our own.
I'm hoping also to reach out to people who are dabbling in poetry and connect them to the scene here in Rockland and online.
Donna:
I couldn't help but notice that both Eclectica, the journal for which you edit poetry, and National Poetry Month celebrate 30th anniversaries this year. Does the Journal have any special plans?
Christine:
Eclectica is putting together a series of print anthologies, as we did for our 20th anniversary. I just finished the first trip through the page proofs of the poetry antho. There will also be (possibly two) prose anthos.
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Christine has taught writing and poetry in the Clarkstown schools. Her own poems have appeared in Rattle, The McNeese Review, ONE ART, Glimpse, Hole in the Head Review, The After Happy Hour Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Confetti, and many other literary magazines. Her fourth full-length poetry collection, Why I Don't Take Xanax, was just released by Kelsay Books. She will read and sign copies of her book at The Sparkle on Friday, May 1. Free admission to the reading!
