HANDS-ON: A Poetry Workshop with Clem Starck

HANDS-ON: A Poetry Workshop with Clem Starck—a critique session

A poem is a little machine made of words. It has two lives: a life on the page and a life in the air.
This workshop will address the following questions:
1. How does a poem work?
2. What makes it “work”?
3. How does it read and how does it sound?
Participants will bring in multiple copies of a poem or two of their own, printed and unattributed (no indication of authorship on the page.) The instructor will read each poem aloud, according to how it has been presented or scored on the page. As a group we will look closely at, and listen closely to, these individual poems, examining their mechanism, noting their strengths and pointing out their weaknesses.

$25 fee. Fifteen people maximum. pre-registration required. Register at https://www.olympiapoetrynetwork.org/

Clemens Starck was born in Rochester, New York in 1937. After dropping out of Princeton he supported his literary and intellectual interests for fifty years by working with his hands. A former merchant seaman, a retired union carpenter and construction foreman, he is the author of seven books of poems—including the award-winning Journeyman’s Wages (1995) and the most recent Cathedrals & Parking Lots: Collected Poems (2019). A widower, he has three grown children and lives in the foothills of the Coast Range in western Oregon.