Come Back Early: Revisiting and Revising with Penny Boxall
Invigorate your poems with a fresh approach. ‘One cannot read a book’, wrote Nabokov, ‘one can only reread it’. Revisiting a text, whether reading a favourite poem for the tenth time or looking afresh at a piece of writing drafted years ago, invigorates it in surprising ways.
This workshop will, through critical and creative exercises, hold up a magnifying glass to both the poem itself and to participants' ways of looking, finding ways of turning a fresh pair of eyes on what they do. They’ll explore how acquaintance and unfamiliarity, personal experience and different lenses can colour a text through close-reading of poems by Jacob Polley, Sharon Olds, Louis MacNeice and others. They’ll discuss how the world – both past and present, internal and external – infiltrates their readings and writings; whether familiarity (in writing at least) breeds contempt or comfort. They’ll look at how to spruce up a comfortable old idea through redrafting and reinvention – and how to make the most of being an experienced reader.
