The Daily Draft: 30 Days in the Poetry Atelier

30 Days in the Poetry Atelier is a generative writing course for National Poetry Month (or any month)— one prompt every weekday, and weekend adventures every Saturday and Sunday. It's built around my Pocket Atelier notebooks, but any notebook will do. Each weekday, you'll prepare the page with wet materials (gesso, watercolor, paint), read a poem and a passage from something strange while it dries, receive the prompt, make marks with your hands until the words arrive, and then write. On weekends, the notebook goes in your pocket and comes with you into the world. The course releases one day at a time. That's not a technical constraint; it's the method. Poems don't arrive all at once, and neither does this. You don't have to have written a poem before. You just have to feel the urge to. This course runs on the belief that poems are not made of ideas; they're made of materials — sounds and images, the feel of a pen in your hand, the strange text you found at the thrift shop for a dollar, and the body. The prompts don't ask you to write toward them. They ask you to receive them, look the other way, and let the poem arrive from a direction you weren't watching. It's oblique by design. It tends to work. Thirty days working side by side with me in our poetry atelier.