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I repeat Kelsey's Blog.

Forgive me but this is too important to overlook.

Workshop Syllabus: The Great, Big, All-Inclusive Critique Workshop
Description/Goal:

A lot of folks who don't offer critique (who aren't doing so for
selfish reasons) don't offer suggestions because they don't feel qualified. I’ve seen
it in countless comments on forums and in real-world workshops. They don't have
the terminology, the technical skills, the poetic know-how, or the formal education
overall.
This workshop is intended to serve the needs of readers and writers who want a
more formal foundation for suggesting revisions and giving writing advice.
A new area of focus will be shared every week for six weeks, but participants will be
able to follow the workshop at their own pace beyond the six weeks.
Objectives:
By following my critique blogs and some additional scholarship, together we will
explore different writing concerns for poetry. These writing concerns include
content, flow, word efficiency, imagery, literary devices, syntax, and more. During
this workshop we will learn how to identify, analyze, and discuss these features of
writing for the benefit of our own poetry and the poetry of others.
This is not a workshop for poets to workshop any of their own writing; it is an
in-depth introduction to critique where we will explore “anonymous” poetry.
Level of expertise:

Open to all
Subject matter:

Critique and Understanding Writing Concerns
1
Introduction
The terminology for writing concerns differs depending on the type of writing, but
composition scholars and educators often create hierarchies of the concerns that
are pertinent to their type of writing. These hierarchies help teach writers how to
prioritize the revision, editing, and feedback process.
Focus, structure (organization), and audience are some of the highest concerns for
essay writing. Word choice and spelling are some of the lowest concerns. Why is
that? Because dictionaries and automatic spell checkers can go far and in a long
piece of non-fiction prose like an essay, a few typos are much less critical to the
overall understanding of the piece than a clear focus and well-defined topic.
We can fit poetic writing concerns into a hierarchy just like these, but the order of
our concerns will be different. For the poet, every single word should be very
important. In free verse, structure may hold little concern, but for haiku and
sonnets structure is a top priority.
During each section of the workshop, we will first spend time discussing and
learning about these writing concerns, then with the tools at our disposal we will
apply our learning to a poem.
If you are new to analyzing or critiquing poetry all together, you may want to check
out some of the following resources:

https://www.neopoet.com/swamp-witch/blog/tue-2018-01-02-1454

https://www.neopoet.com/swamp-witch/blog/sat-2018-01-27-1744

https://thewritepractice.com/three-easy-steps-to-critique-a-friends-poem/

http://www.writing-world.com/poetry/crit.shtml

https://poeticlinesense.wordpress.com/2009/06/11/how-to-critique-poetry/

https://www.vaniercollege.qc.ca/tlc/tipsheets/reading-and-analyzing/how-to-
analyze-a-poem.pdf

https://www.mgccc.edu/learning_lab/writing/poetry/poetry.html

https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/poetry-explications/
2

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