Perhaps you’ve been told at some point or another: “Writing is revising.” Well, it’s true. Writing is revising—but what exactly does this mean? Editing line breaks? Adding stanzas? Cutting down? Throwing the whole thing in the trash?

Revising can be intimidating territory for all of us, but in this workshop we will take a different approach from that of the cruel taskmaster that lives in most of our brains. While there is a time and place for laser-beam “editing” as we tend to think of it, those first and second drafts are almost never the time or place to do so at a productive pace. Instead, we will focus on re-imagining our poems from a place of possibility and cultivation, instead of punishment.

In this workshop, we’ll learn to approach our poems as gardeners and not police, remembering that they are merely drafts—fertile soil for possible regenerations of an original impulse or feeling. Drawing from Rachel Zucker’s method of “radical revision,” we will examine our own poems through lenses of re-visioning, exploring new incarnations our poems might exist in. This course is aimed toward students who already have a number of poems to choose from that they would like to radically revise, whether they be new or old. Students should note that because of time constraints per week, those up for workshop can only submit one poem for group feedback consideration, but may have the option of scheduling a 30-minute 1-on-1 call with the instructor before the final workshop session.

About the Instructor

Natasha Oladokun is a Black, queer poet and essayist from Virginia. She earned a BA in English from the University of Virginia, and an MFA in creative writing from Hollins University. She holds fellowships from Cave Canem, The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Jackson Center for Creative Writing, Twelve Literary Arts, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the inaugural First Wave Poetry fellow. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, Image, Harvard Review Online, Kenyon Review Online, Harper’s Bazaar, Catapult, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and is working on her first collection of poems.

Revising Your Poems (Like a Gardener, Not Police), 6 sessions with Natasha Oladokun