Our mission at TPC has always been two-fold: to be accessible to any poet at any level, while offering critical and thoughtful consideration of work brought to critique. These might seem like contradictory goals — how can a collective be both rigorous and welcoming to poets at all levels?
The answer lies in our approach. We invite poets to come with no cherished outcome, but to bring their best work, to specify which feedback they want, and to expect feedback that hits at many levels. We invite poets to be gracious with others' work and be open to how things land and how they are received. Once you make something and let it out into the world, it's in conversation with people who will read it differently.
The numbers speak to our success: For 7 years, we've consistently held free critique workshops twice a month, totaling roughly 170 workshops. Each session draws 6 to 23 poets, and every single workshop welcomes at least 1-2 newcomers. We have 17 to 60 year-old poets join our workshops.
Since I’ve been at the helm, we’ve expanded beyond critique to offer generative, pedagogic, and craft workshops led by experienced poets in our community:
So far, we’ve had a lot of interesting workshops:
- Piera Chen led an ekphrastic workshop on photography
- Elīna Eihmane led one titled ‘drawing for poets’
- I led one on erasure/blackout poetry
- Jonathan Pyner’s workshop focused on sonnets
- Kevin Wang invited participants to translate poetry from Chinese to English
- L. Acadia led one outlining how to submit poetry, hopefully get it accepted, and how to not give in to the rejection blues
- Jeremy Beacock led one on rhythm and stress in poetry
- C.K. Hugo Chung invited poets to reclaim and write the word(s) that once triggered and overwhelmed
- k tiao’s workshop was based on a surrealist poetry game “le cadavre exquis”, or exquisite corpse, and participants explored the realm of collaborative writing with a series of experiments and restraints
- plus many others I can’t think of right now
And there’s more coming.