Poetry Breakthrough 2025
Three Wednesday workshops, April 2, 9, and 16, 7:00-9:00pm
Cost: $35-$65 sliding scale* per workshop, Register for one or all three!
Are you creating consistently compelling drafts? Satisfied with your revision process? Comfortable with your ability to share your work publicly? If not, this is your chance to become a poetry triple threat! This series is for poets who want more from their practice. If it’s time to make a bigger commitment to your writing life, increase your current output, and improve your ability to share your work, these intensives are for you! Register for one or all three!
April 2: I FEEL A DRAFT: CLOSE READING AND EXTREME REVISION
This workshop supports participants in turning drafts into poems. We will explore our satisfactions and dissatisfactions with our writing practice. We will discuss and demonstrate close reading, and how this affects revision. We will also discuss steps to achieving finished poems and collections. Each participant will offer one poem to the group for workshopping.
April 9: YOUR WRITING OBSESSION: CONSTRAINT AND VULNERABILITY
This workshop support participants in creating or honing their process for success. Writing can leave us in a dilemma between public exposure and personal vulnerability. This workshop will explore constraints we put on ourselves that can either promote or hinder our creativity. Also, we will practice generative exercises that help us acclimate to discomfort, and produce work that connects deeply with readers.
April 16: GOING PUBLIC: PUBLISHING AND PERFORMING
This workshop support participants in valuing their writing. If you are brave enough to share your writing, how do you deal with the fickleness and competition inherent in the industry? What can you do to make your submissions and presentations more compelling? Each participant will perform a short reading and receive feedback. Limited to 8 participants.
To register, email programs@nohoarts.org (preferred) or call the Center at 413-584-7327. Please include your name, address, and telephone contact. Course fees are payable in advance by check to “NCFA” and can be mailed to the Northampton Center for the Arts, PO Box 366, Northampton MA 01061, or by Paypal here.
*Payments on the upper end of the scale help support our commitment to sliding scale rates, as well as our low teacher/participant ratio. Financial aid is available through our Community Fund.
Michael Favala Goldman is an award-winning poet, jazz clarinetist, and translator of Danish literature. Michael’s eight books of original poetry include Small Sovereign, which took first place at the 2022 Los Angeles Book Festival. Among his seventeen translated books is Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen, which made the New York Times Best Books of the Century as book three of The Copenhagen Trilogy. His work has appeared in scores of publications including The New Yorker, Rattle, and The Harvard Review. He has been running poetry critique groups since 2018. https://michaelfavalagoldman.com/