Explore music of poetry at Second Saturday Workshop in Palatine

Submitted by Northwest Cultural Council

The Northwest Cultural Council will hold its Second Saturday Poetry Workshop from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday, Jan. 12. Saturday’s topic, led by Andrea Witzke Slot, will be “Making Music: Orchestrating Sound and Sense in a Poem.”

Andrea Witzke Slot is author of “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. She is currently working on the final chapters of a novel titled “The Silence of Ella Mendelssohn.” 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.

What does Ezra Pound mean when he states, “Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music”? How is poetry like music? How does it differ? What techniques and tropes can help a poem get closer to music? What might push a poem further away from music? This session will examine specific techniques that play with the sound, rhythm, and structure of a poem. They also will look at poetic forms that evolved out of song and music, and participants will have a chance to produce a new song-like poem incorporating methods and strategies discussed.

Participants are encouraged to bring 15 copies of their own work to share with the group. Workshops take place on the second Saturday of each month at the Palatine Public Library, 700 N. North Court. All poets and writers are invited to attend the workshop. The cost is $15. For reservations for the workshop, call the gallery at (847) 991-7966 or email at nwcc@northwestculturalcouncil.org.