The first workshop of MPC’s Craft Seminar Series explored how the simple act of reading a poem can open doors into your own new work. 

What if the simple act of reading a poem could open doors into your own new work? What if another poet’s words could beckon your own words to the page? Join poet Molly Spencer for this workshop that explores the importance of reading for your writing practice, and the ways close reading of a poem can lead you to your own material. We’ll read poems by contemporary poets, discuss specific methods for finding entry points to our own poems through the work of others, and use one (or more) of the strategies to write something new. Please bring a poem or two (or a book or two of poems) that you feel your poems are in kinship with, or that make you feel inspired to write.

Molly Spencer is a poet, critic, and editor. Her debut collection, If the House (2019), won the Brittingham Prize judged by Carl Phillips. A second collection, Hinge (2020) won the Crab Orchard Open Competition judged by Allison Joseph. Molly’s recent poetry has appeared in Blackbird, FIELD, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her critical writing has appeared at Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and The Rumpus, where she is a senior poetry editor. She teaches writing at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.