Today is the day that I will finally get a chance to plot my teaching strategy for next week's visit to Westover School. Unlike most of my recent teaching gigs, which have involved rural public schools and students without much poetry experience, this one will feature ambitious, well-read students who are accustomed to taking poetry seriously.

These advantages don't guarantee that the workshop will be a breeze. To begin with, all of the students will be girls, a challenge in itself, since the Fates have seen fit to make me a boy specialist. There's also the huge task of circumventing the analytical mind, always an issue with top-flight students. They know a lot, and they know how to talk about what they know, but they are so used to standing outside themselves and looking back in at the work that, when they find themselves forced to be creators rather than analyzers, they often struggle with voice, diction, and solidity of language in ways that so-called lower-level students do not.

In such cases, many of these young writers turn to form and facile word manipulation as substitutes for self. So I'm thinking of doing a sonnet workshop, one that focuses on line rather than end rhyme. I'm sure that every one of these girls can rhyme in her sleep, but a rhyme scheme does not a sonnet make.

Then again, maybe I'll do something else. I'll let you know.