Homegrown Poetry Retreats

Article by Ellen Goldstein

We can’t all go to Yaddo. Do you dream of spending a month at a writers retreat in New England, writing all day, and being served gourmet meals in the evening in the company of other writers and artists? Have you been too busy working as a third assistant accountant to pick up a pen and start the sonnet sequence that has been simmering in your head for months? If, like many of us, you can’t leave your life or job for a month, you can still craft an informal poetry retreat of your own.

Take the time. If you have funds enough and time, you can stay in a hotel or a bed and breakfast. Maybe you can get a house-sitting gig, or maybe your family or roommates are going away for the weekend. Cultivate friends with a summer house that they might be willing to lend you. Gary Snyder wrote in a tower in the northern Cascade Mountains while working as a fire lookout, which sounds romantic, but even a day at the library spent focusing on poetry will drive your work forward. The most important thing is that you have uninterrupted time and the psychic space you need to do your work.

Set reasonable goals. If you are a person who works well with a schedule, write out a schedule in advance. Even if you prefer to be unfettered by the tyranny of clocks, it’s good to have one or two goals for your poetry retreat. Don’t expect to write an entire book over a weekend, but instead aim for one or two really strong poem beginnings or drafts. You may spend hours over one line, but all the work on an individual poem (or word) is work on poetry in general. Your next poem will benefit from time you spent on this one.

When things look bad, remember the Athena poems. One of the hardest things about retreats can be expectations. You may go to the perfect house on a windswept beach, your laptop may be powered up, your pencils are sharpened, you are ready for the muse; but sometimes she isn’t ready for you. Even if you spend forty-eight hours fighting to get words on the page, even if every line sounds trite, or off somehow, you are spending time with your poems and it will pay off. A week, or a month, or a year from now you will write a poem that will come easily and that will need only a little revision. It will spring fully formed from your forehead, just like Athena. These poems are a gift from the work we put in at harder times when the poems just don’t seem to want to go anywhere.

Go on field trips. If you have enough time, plan activities that complement your work. Most of us can’t write every second of the day. Bring along books to read that inspire you. Plan an excursion to a park or a museum and bring a notebook. In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg has some good ideas about how to use a new setting as material for your writing.

Bring friends. Do you have friends who are poets? Plan a group poetry retreat. You will inspire each other to do good work. Poetry exercises are great for a group. You can begin with an Exquisite Corpse Exquisite Corpse to help you warm up. Do other exercises and read your work aloud. Have a line auction, and write a poem from a favorite line from one of your friends. The poems you produce may not be ready for the New Yorker, but it will give you some great ideas.

Some resources. There are some great books out there about writing poetry but two of them that I find the most useful (and chock full of exercises) are The Practice of Poetry and The Poet’s Companion. Writing Down the Bones, while not limited to poetry, is another inspirational book.

Now go forth and write!

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Ellen Goldstein is a poet with a full-time job in publishing. She has been to two official writing residencies and numerous homegrown retreats. Her poems have appeared in Mid-American Review, Lilith (forthcoming), Measure, and StorySouth.