Poetry Craft Workshop: How to Polish Prose into Poetry
“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set it free.”
While I love the idea of a scruffy-bearded Michelangelo circling a 17-foot slab of marble and pressing the chisel, each crack coming closer to revealing what lay beneath, as a metaphor for creating a poem from our freewriting, it seems awfully long ago, far-away, and slightly unrelatable.
So, let’s take Stephen McCool, who took his fifth trip to dig for diamonds at the Crater of Diamonds State Park in my home state of Arkansas in November of 2020. The park has a 37-acre plowed field which is the eroded surface of an ancient, diamond-bearing volcanic pipe. Stephen was on his 11th bucket, “wet sifting” using screens and water, his gloved hands soaked through and the water ice cold, when he found it. He found a 4.49-carat canary yellow diamond.
Both stories compare to the writer at the page, especially when it comes to finding the “treasure” in our sometimes nonsensical freewriting. I have vivid memories of following my brother through our grand-parents tobacco farm fields in North Carolina while he looked for arrowheads and I whined about being hot and being bit by chiggers. Writing is like that, trying to sift through the detritus, itching and whining, going back again and again, until you find that “thing”. That word or image or story that shines with an energy all its own and you know you’ve found something. And that’s when the work of polishing begins.
My first workshop outside of our weekly writing groups will be about just this, polishing our prose into poetry. I’ve mentioned in our groups, I am sure if you went through your writing that day and picked out the strongest nouns and verbs, you would have the foundation of a new poem. If you’ve been in my groups you know I frequently refer to the “abiding image” as a central facet of the poem, and we will be using the new book by my teacher and poet, Cathy Smith Bowers called The Abiding Image: Inspiration and Guidance for Beginning Writers, Readers, and Teachers of Poetry as our field guide for this workshop. In this 6-week workshop, we will look at how to cut, shape, and polish our freewriting into poetry, freewriting from a variety of poetry prompts, taking a look at the tools of the craft, and applying those to our work.
I hope you will join me. Check the website for dates and times!
Ellis Elliott is a published author and poet. Join her Bewilderness Writing Workshops and use free writing to find yourself and your voice on the page. Order her poetry collection Break in the Field.