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Mid-River Poetry Workshop

Instructor:
Rebecca Wee

Rebecca Wee teaches poetry in the English department at Augustana. She has received numerous poetry prizes and awards including the 2000 Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets and a 2003 Witter Bynner Fellowship, awarded by U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins and the Library of Congress.

Copper Canyon Press published her first collection of poems, Uncertain Grace in 2001 and from 2003-2005 she served as poet laureate for the Quad Cities. In 1992 she received her MFA in poetry from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where she studied for three years with poets Carolyn Forché, C.K. Williams, Frank Bidart, Adrienne Rich, Li-Young Lee, Rita Dove, and others. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Poetry 180 (edited by Billy Collins), The Sonora Review, The Mid-American Poetry Review, and others.

Program dates June 17-22

Cost $750

Includes lodging, all meals and any field trips. Students arrive on campus Sunday, June 17, and depart Friday, June 22.

Course description

Consider the difference between the following statements:

"It's really windy today."

"The wind makes a salad of the countryside."

One of those sentences is poetry and one is prose; one asserts an observation and one sings.

In this workshop you will spend one week writing and reading, revising and discussing poetry with others who are interested in how poems do what they do and why they matter so much. Our day-long workshops will focus on a range of themes and genres; you will spend part of each day reading and examining poems and part of the day writing them. Your interests and questions will guide some of our activities and exercises but the main goal of the course is to introduce you to as much good poetry as possible in a week, and prompt you to write as much as you can. We will likely take parts of two days to write off-campus; a field trip to the Iowa Writers Workshop in Iowa City has been instructive and inspiring for previous groups so we'll plan to do it again.

Tentative schedule

Sunday, June 17

  • Check-in
  • Welcome reception

Monday, June 18

  • “Learn to Notice What You Notice” - Imagery: Seeing and Description

Tuesday, June 19

  • “I Go Back” - Secrets, Autobiography and Confession

Wednesday, June 20

  • “How to See Water” - Poems of the Natural World
  • We will join the other writing group for part of the day in a boat on the Mississippi River, so our writing focus will be water, sky, the world in motion…(bring and wear sunscreen, hat, etc.)
  • Lunch on a sandbar

Thursday, June 21
“A falling flower
Fluttering back to the branch—
Was a butterfly.” (Moritake)
(Haiku, sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, and more. Today we’ll try some forms.)

Friday, June 22

  • “Children of the Epoch” – Poems of love and war, protest and hope.
  • Depart for home

Note: Depending on the Prairie Lights Bookstore and Iowa Writers Workshop reading schedule, we will make a trip to Iowa City, probably on Thursday for an evening poetry reading.

We will also use an afternoon or evening for individual critiques of your poetry; the timing of this will be determined on Monday after we’ve spent some time working together.