Second Saturday Poetry Workshop set for Sept. 13

The Northwest Cultural Council announces a Second Saturday Poetry Workshop to be held from 9 a.m.-noon on Saturday, Sept. 13, led by Andrea Witzke Slot. Saturday's topic will be "Developing Voice and Dialogue in Poetic Form."

Many contemporary definitions of poetry continue to turn to the concept of a single voice in a poem, as summed up in such quotes as Matthew Arnold's, "Poetry is a dialogue of the mind with itself" and John Stuart Mill's, "Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude," despite the desire to erase the 'I' altogether in some avant-garde/experimental work.

Scholarly work on a number of contemporary poets, however, argues that the 'I' is a key aspect of a strong lyric poem, and that this 'I' can never be erased as every written voice comes from a specific context and point in time. Moreover, different voices in a poem can be in "conversation" or dialogue, which can create new modes of meaning and music in a poem.

This workshop will provide a practical look at these concepts in the creation and revision of poems. Specifically, participants will be given strategies for analyzing the voice(s) in their own poems and the poems of others and learn imaginative techniques for creating successful poetic dialogue by developing moving points of perspective between two or more voices in a poem.

Andrea Witzke Slot is author of the poetry collection, "To find a new beauty," Gold Wake Press, 2012. Her work has appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Translation Review, Written River: A Journal of Eco-Poetics, The Pacific Review, Southern Women's Review and Chiron Review, among other online and print journals.

Witzke Slot is currently working on the final chapters of a novel titled "The Silence of Ella Mendelssohn," as well as an academic manuscript that explores multivoiced poetry as a source of social justice and democratic understanding, a chapter of which will appear in a book of criticism on Julia Alvarez titled "Inhabiting 'La Patria': Identity, Agency, and 'Antojo' in the work of Julia Alvarez" (SUNY Press, 2013).

She teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is an associate editor at Rhino Poetry as well as the book review editor at Fifth Wednesday Journal. She lives just outside of Chicago with her husband, the youngest of her five children/stepchildren, and her crazy West Highland terrier, Macbeth.

Participants are encouraged to bring 15 copies of their own work to share with the group. Workshops take place at the Palatine Public Library, 700 N. North Court, Palatine, the second Saturday of each month. All poets and writers are invited to attend the workshop. The cost is $15. Please R.S.V.P. to (847) 991-7966 or nwcc@northwestcultural council.org.

• Submit 'Your News' at daily herald.com/share.