We had planned an all-day in-person workshop — working on a single poem from start to finish — for October 30th, but with the constant rocket and drone attacks from Hisballah, and occasionally Hamas, still ongoing, we decided to postpone it to a time when it would be safer to travel. Hopefully soon! Instead, we held a 2-hour Zoom “mini-workshop” on the same date. Our long-term member and presenter of several prior workshops, Eli Ben-Joseph, stepped up at short notice with a workshop on the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Again it was fully booked with 25 attendees.
Eli gave us a wealth of useful information on Dickinson’s life and the main themes of her poetry, accompanied by a small but representative selection of her poems. For the workshop exercise he offered five prompts based on details of her poetry or her life: to write a poem…
- about an animal to which you had an intense reaction
- in which you take on the persona of someone of the opposite sex
- about a psychotic break
- “taming” a difficult life event (including death, a prominent theme of her poems)
- about the loss of innocence or vitality
Eli left time at the end for everyone who wanted to do so, to read the resulting first draft of their poem, and most of the attendees did. As usual, after giving participants a month to edit/polish their poem before sending it in, we produced an e-chapbook of poems started or written at the workshop which was sent to all attendees.
Many thanks to Eli for preparing this workshop at short notice, and to our hard-working workshop coordinator, Elana Dorfman, for organizing it.
And as usual, here are a few screenshots to give a feel of the Zoom event: some participants concentratedly working on their poems:
And a partial screenshot of the gallery of attendees:
Voices Israel Group of Poets in English 