As you might have expected, when I actually sat down to create a workshop plan for Friday's Westover School visit, the result had nothing at all to do with sonnets. After reading a few batches of student work, I decided to revisit two poems that I have often taught in other contexts but to focus on them somewhat differently:

* I'll start off by dictating Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s “Afraid So.” Afterward, we'll quickly discuss the punctuation-line relationship.

*Then line by line students will take turns reading Kim Addonizio’s “Garbage” (which I can't find online but appears in her collection Tell Me). At this point we'll expand our discussion of the relationship between punctuation-line and emotional-moral intensity in both poems.

* Now I'll ask the students to choose a question from the Beaumont poem and to draft a poem that spirals from it. They don't necessarily need to answer the question; rather, I want them to follow the question down whatever path it leads them.

* If technology is on our side, we'll share drafts on a projector so that students can discuss the punctuation-line strategies they found themselves taking. We'll talk about ways to ask ourselves and others some basic questions about revision: For instance, "point out two places in which those strategies worked well in the poem." "Point out one place that makes you ask a 'what if [you made a specific line-punctuation adjustment]' question."

*With whatever time is left, I'll put myself on the hot seat and talk about some of the punctuation-line challenges I've been dealing with in my western Pennsylvania project. I'll share a few of those poems and some of the primary sources that inspired them, and talk a bit about how I moved from what was often prose diary text into dramatic monologues in verse, often written in specific (if invented) forms.