Drafts and Revisions: How Poems Are Made (Margaret Mackinnon)

This seminar will meet in person at WriterHouse for one session on Saturday, July 25 from 1:00 to 5:00 PM.

Description:

Anyone who writes seriously soon learns that revision is a central part of the process. A poem can be revised by making only small changes, but some revisions are more dramatic. Marianne Moore, who continued to revise her poems even after they had been published, famously cut “Poetry” from thirty lines to three. Ezra Pound took Eliot’s original draft of “The Waste Land” and helped create a Modernist collage.  Sonia Sanchez urges poets to “revise purposefully and constantly and playfully.” In this one-day seminar, we will look at a range of specific approaches and strategies other writers have used in revising their work. Seminar members will also be invited to share their own “before” and “after” poems to highlight their experiences with revision. Finally, we will focus on poems by members of the group that are still in the process of being revised.  

About the Instructor:

Margaret Mackinnon is the author of two collections of poetry, The Invented Child (Silverfish Review Press 2013), winner of the 2014 Literary Award in Poetry from the Library of Virginia, and Afternoon in Cartago (Ashland Poetry Press 2022), winner of the Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize. Her work has appeared in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Image, Poetry, Blackbird, and other journals. She attended Vassar College and the University of North Carolina, and she received her MFA in poetry from the University of Florida. She lives with her family in Richmond.