give me a second: a generative poetry editing workshop

Editing does not equate to subtraction and can mean anything from expanding, shifting, or saving things for a later poem. Try to think of editing as a second writing and a second chance to learn about and love your writing. There is no “right” way to write a poem and some poems will never “feel” done, but editing, like writing, should be doing something for you. Editing is a type of play (or tinkering), there’s no real rules or expectations to be limited by, which is both exciting and overwhelming. Some writers dread editing and barely include it in their writing process but others revel in it and find it to be a generative experience.

This is the workshop for the people who want a moment of guided editing activities to help them look at their work with fresh eyes, get other people’s eyes on their poem, and potentially generate more pieces in relation to what they already have. This is for the people that want to discuss what editing means to them and how that does/doesn’t suit the standard connotation of the word so we can start trying to fathom what we’d like editing to do for us as writers in order to make our practice more sustainable.  

Workshopers are asked to bring in 3 poems. One you have written recently and would like to use for the editing experiments, another poem that you’ve written and feel really good about and don’t plan on editing further (for sharing/introductions, we will not be editing this poem), and a poem you’ve read recently written by someone else (it can be a poem you particularly dislike or enjoy).   

Instructor

Dani Charles is a Queer Hispanic poet from McAllen, Texas. They graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2022 where they received an MFA in poetry, the 2021 John Logan Poetry Prize, as well as appeared in Poetry Magazine and Denver Quarterly. They’re sad to be moving away from Iowa City in August but ecstatic to start the Creative Writing PhD Program at University of Cincinnati this fall.