The Power of Theme: What Matters Most in Your Poetry?

How do themes and concerns in your poetry change as you change? What is that poem you have been meaning to write? The workshop will focus on themes that surface in your writing. Perhaps some are urgent. Perhaps others become nuisances. What seems important and compelling to write about? Where do themes and ideas come from? Christine will discuss her discoveries about themes and issues that emerge over a lifetime of writing and publishing poetry. Writers will glean various themes, issues, and concerns that keep emerging in their own poetry and be encouraged to write what they are most passionate about or to strike out in a new direction.

Are these themes you want to continue or can some be shelved for fresher ones? What is the most urgent and important idea for your next poem? Are they fodder for a collection or chapbook? Participants will have time to write and share a rough draft of a new poem, based on something that matters deeply. Finally, we will talk about ways to organize a poetry collection thematically. Some prefer a short chapbook on one theme fully developed. Others lean toward longer books with several themes incorporated. We’ll discuss the value of both approaches.

The goal is to emerge from the workshop with a stronger sense of power of themes in the poetry process and a new poem!

CHRISTINE SWANBERG’s books include Tonight On This Late Road, Invisible String, Bread Upon The Waters, Slow Miracle, The Tenderness Of Memory, The Red Lacquer Room, Who Walks Among The Trees With Charity and The Alleluia Tree, and most recently Wild Fruition: Sonnets, Spells, and Other Incantations. Hundreds of her poems appear in literary journals. Recent essays appear in Women On Poetry and Writing After Retirement. She gives readings and workshops throughout the USA, most recently Palm Beach Community Center, FL; Sedona, AZ; Poetry Rendezvous in Taos, NM; Dickinson Series; Door Country, WI. She has been a writing teacher and mentor for forty years and was an instructor at the Clearing.

At AllWriters’, we strive to bring you the best! Several times a year, we offer a Celebrity Saturday, which brings in a better-known, better-published author to work with you for one intensive day. Celebrity Saturday authors have included Jane Hamilton, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Michael Perry, A. Manette Ansay, Marilyn Taylor, Ellen Kort, and many, many more! Celebrity Saturdays run from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. and cost $95, which includes a lunch catered by Cafe De Art in Waukesha!