Workshops
About Tree Seed Workshops
A sort of open university to nurture younger in the craft poets, increase the depth and breadth of anyone's knowledge base. It aims to help poets form a community of peers as well as inform their poetics as faciliators act as catalyst for a particular aspect of poetry which lights their fires. They are a mix of presentation, exercise and discussion.
PAST foci & Facilitators
Shannon Webb-Campbell on correspondence and peotry, Chuqiao Yang on poems and songs about love, Rachel McCrum on a Ribbon Around a Bomb, John Barton on the sonnet as day book, Jeff Blackman on how to win friends and invluence poems, Ben Ladouceur on writing exercises modelled after great poems by new and new-ish authors, E Martin Nolan on capturing weird and scary times.
Ian Martin on The Poetics of Play, Christopher Levensonon how to manage line breaks, cadence and verse movement, Claudia Coutu Radmore on writing terminals, Susan Atkinson with Poetry and Games, Jeff Blackman on Pop poetry: uplifting poems from the lowest common denominators, Chris Jennings, Brenda Vellino on Ways of Thinking about Constraint on Free Verse Formalism, Sarah MacDonell on Writing the Body, Manahil Bandukwala on (Multi)lingual Poetry Daniel Groleau Landry on the art of spoken word performance, Rachel McCrum on Odes, Pearl Pirie on Haiku, MaryLee Bragg on how to Lift it off the Page, Nina Jane Drystek on Ekphrasis: What inspires a poem?, Sneha Madhavan-Reese on Creative Journaling, Deanna Young on Oswald’s poetry.
Anita Dolman on Gender and Sexuality, and poetry as a storytelling device from from Sexton, to Suknaski to Clarke to You, Jean Van Loon on writing historical figures, Rhonda Douglas on getting a book from manuscript to publication, Robert Stacey on Experiments in Translation, Jennifer Baker's from Experimental Lyric to Cognitive Poetics, D.S. Stymeist on lyric confessional and the sonnet, Barbara Myers on prompts to get to the volta, elizabeth burns out of the comfort zone: gut Symmetries like a Jeannette Winterson Novel, Susan McMaster on hard editing, joseph ianni on the intersection of visual and performance poetry, and Jennifer Pederson on how to use different kinds of mics and your voice.
Sanita Fejzic on Hybrid Texts: Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, Jessica Bebenek on knowing your audience, projection and voice, reading with intention and making a well-balanced set, Willow-Marie Power on the neuroscience of writers block, Colin Morton on animating inner life, Claudia Coutu Radmore on haibun, Avonlea Fotheringham on publishing 101, Susan Gillis on fostering tension and release in our poetry, Marilyn Irwin on prompts and on breaking the line, Kayleigh Watts on poetry and song composition, LM Rochefort on cut-ups, Murray Citron on translations of Hebrew, German , Italian Polish poetry that resulted from the Shoah experience, and Brecken Hancock on memoir and confessional.
JM Francheteau on personae poems, Phil Hall on the constraints of Larry Eigner, Mark Goldstein on homolinguistic transtranslation and nature of translation using an example of Catallus, Peter Richardson and John Steffler each roundtabled poems of participants, Sylvia Adams led a workshop on salvaging a problem poem, Stephen Brockwell spoke on French-Canadian poetry including Saint -Denys Barneau, Claude Gauvreau, Gaston Miron, Paul Marie Lapointe, Nicole Brossard and more, and Luminita Suse showed tanka, the form and history, related forms and contemporary practice.
Frances Boyle on Open Sesame and Ariadne's Thread/using forms to get to wild mind, Phil Jenkins on readability, Jenna Tenn-Yuk on negotiating the complexities of your identity & on facing fears, Pierre Brault on comparison of lessons & practice in poetry vs. stand-up comedy, and Bruce Taylor on using sound's power of euphony and cacophony looking at close reads from Edith Sitwell to Charles Olsen, Stephen Morrissey to Mary Oliver, Louis Dudek to Derek Walcott, and a look at nonsense and riddle verse.
Claudia Radmore on linking and shifting the tone and content in renga, Jenny Sampirisi on hybrid texts that cross genres looking at Beckett, Cixous, Anne Carson and John Cage, John Koengen on stage presence, using your breath, being in your body, Gwynn Scheltema with an intro to OULIPO such as The N + 7 Exercise and homophonic translation, Brandon Wint on imagery and sensuality, Christine McNair on the material of books: how to choose paper and the group doing a few bindings, Stuart Ross on poem techniques after Joe Brainard, Bruce Kauffman on guided stream of consciousness, Cathy MacDonald-Zytveld with 10 writing prompts and exercise with projecting your voice.
Jeff Latosik on switching the POV of classic poems; Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Lotus Eaters" made contemporary, Lesley Strutt roundtabling a discussion of the challenges of translating poetry, Jay Millar on the long poem with examples of Christopher Dewdney and others in The New Long Poem Anthology, Brenda Leifso doing how-poems-work in magical realism, Ian Keteku with exercises to extend a metaphor and finding fresh phrasings.
Monty Reid on the connection between place and poetry, mapping and the muse, making a poetry map of Ottawa, Robin Macdonald on yoga body/mind listening in finding your direction as a poet, Roland Prevost round tabling our motivations for writing, LM Rochefort on the bilingual poem, Imagistes, cut up poetry, collage poetry and techniques for projecting your voice, Guy Simser on tanka's developments overseas and in North America, Barbara Myers on pov; alienated insiders or as outsiders wanting in, and close reads of poems to consider syntax work for you, Ikenna Onyegbula teaching strucure and memory techniques in spoken word, Terry Ann Carter on glosas of women writers, Akiko Yosano, beat poets including Gary Snyder, and using found text.
Cameron Anstee looking at the personal poem and the list poem with examples from Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan and Jim Smith, Mike Buckthought on ancient Greek epigrams, Glenn Kletke on stanza types and effects of line breaks and stanza breaks on sense, Phil Hall on triptychs and roundtabling poems, Sandra Ridley on linear vs. oblique and risk vs. silence, rob mclennan on writing from language and from other writers from PENN sound, Claudia Coutu Radmore on the beauty of juxtaposition and a look at senryu, and Ronnie R Brown on using line and stanza breaks to enhance your poetry, and on finding an effective title and Pearl Pirie on frames of poetic values, sestinas, combining the material of disparate poems, use of space & punctuation, and rhythm.
GOALS
Since 2009, Tree has been offering a series of one-hour poetry workshops to take a closer look into poetry, techniques, forms and close reads of particular poems. The sessions provide a time and space for people to talk about poetic practice and techniques, a close read of how poems can work, why poetry works and how to present ideas.
The time can deepen each participant's foundations and widen the explorations of our poetry community to become better readers, writers and editors.
Developing organically, each facilitator acts as a unique catalyst, bringing a special angle and passion on craft and practice in poetry. Most provide examples and/or exercises for the focus subject, technique, poet or poetry school. Some are hands-on. Some sessions are presenter-presentations. Some session are time for getting more eyes on a piece brought in to share or made in the time (with safe group feedback). If you have someone you would like to hear or something you would like to hear about, contact Chris Johnson thru [email protected]
HOW ARE WE DOING?
We're looking for feedback on how we've been doing. As someone who has attended a Tree Seed Workshop would you like to fill in the 10-question survey?
It should take no more than 5 minutes.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/H5CCFL8
