Writing Resources: Dos and Don’ts for Leading Poetry Workshops

What follows are a quick set of rules for anyone considering leading a poetry workshop. These rules are not complicated, and they can apply to writers of any age from 1-120.

Do

• Read and talk about different types of poems
• Talk about the pattern of a poem
• Talk about lines and verses
• Join in and write
• Give (and vary) a stimulus and a structure
• Accept whatever writing you get for what it is
• Write individual, pair, group and class poems
• Share ideas and identify good poetic techniques
• Provide poetry books, dictionary, Thesaurus and Rhyming Dictionary
• Make suggestions on improvement
• Model redrafting and establish a redrafting code
• Leave time between writing and redrafting
• Celebrate your poems in readings and displays

Don’t

• Worry about what you don’t know – explore together
• Solve a poem – it’s only a problem if you make it one
• Talk about sentences and paragraphs
• Say poetry is hard or that you can’t write it – you can
• Use a deficit model. So the poem doesn’t rhyme, what does it do?
• Call it a poem if it’s not
• Limit the range of opportunities
• Drum in a few terms
• Devalue the writer’s voice by using books too much
• Tell the writer he/she MUST change anything
• Kill interest by always redrafting
• Use word-processors only for ‘copying out’
• Preserve poetry for the most able