Poetry

Toby Simon
December 7-9

"We were poets before we weren't." Though people are often intimidated by poetry and don't believe they can write it, Toby Simon's Poetry Writing Workshop proves that poetry is as natural to human expression as song, dance, and story. No one need be afraid to write poetry because everyone was a poet once and can become a poet again. Poetry is a condensed language grounded in feeling and visual image. It asks the poet to discover the heartbeat of personal experience and sound it out in rhythm. Everyone has experience and the quest to find its essence satisfies spiritual hungers and intensifies love of living. Yet to discover meaning nascent in our poetical natures requires courage, quietude and patience: courage to delve beneath our social selves, quiet to hear the voice beneath the din, patience to play with words.

Learn a method for silencing the chatter and focusing attention; a procedure for generating an initial draft; and a strategy for moving toward a completed poem. This three-part structure helps us locate our poetic material and begin to write poetry. It deepens appreciation for their own lives and places the high value of self-esteem within everyone's reach. It relieves anxiety by opening time up, giving writers mental space to find our own imaginative forms.

Inevitably, when writing poems, we wrestle with words. In this arena, we humans meet a fine ally and tricky opponent. All for the best! This weekend will heighten our sense of metaphor and imagery and renew our love affair with the music and magic of language.

Tobin Simon has been writing and teaching poetry for over 40 years. After receiving his Ph.D. from NYU, while a professor in Pratt Institute's Department of English and Humanities, he edited Snakeroots, a national literary magazine. In addition to co-directing the Proprioceptive Writing Center, he currently teaches Tobin Simon's Poetry Writing Workshop in New York, about which poet and translator Eileen Hennessy said, "This is the best and most interesting poetry workshop I've ever taken."