How Many Versions [September Edition]

This workshop pack was curated with inspiration from prototyping mindsets in design:

• “Let the prototype do the deciding”. - Dan Hill
• Focus on the next most important thing, not everything at once
• Rules of brainstorming → commitments to each other

This workshop is hosted virtually second Saturday of every month (starting September 13th, 2025). Below you will find the self-guided version. If you’d like to attend the upcoming sessions, you will find links at the bottom of this page, we hope you join us <3

Check-in (5 minutes)

Name the mindset shift you want to approach your piece with:

Revision → Iterative

Precious → Curious

Critical → Playful

Audit before we edit (5 minutes)

Start by going through the final draft, and all the alternatives Kim Addonizio shares for the poem Existential Elegy, you will notice that there is experimentation with language (Exercise 1 below), experimentation with narrator, characters, framing (Exercise 2 below) and experimentation with structure and form (Exercise 3 below).

Then, go through the current draft of your poem to identify one or more elements you want to preserve and play with:

Exercise 1: First Reading & Custom Word Bank (10 minutes)

• We each read our piece as is (current, base version)
• We declared our preserve & play notes
• As the reader is sharing their piece, the rest of us will drop 3-5 words that came to mind for us as we were listening to them. Note: They cannot be words that are part of their poem. 

Our goal is to share texture words (colors, objects, senses, verbs, unexpected associations)

Ex. if someone has a line that says “I walked to the water this morning and looked for…” we may drop words like salt, stroll, waves, searching in the chat.

Rewrite 1 (10 minutes)

Rewrite your poem/piece using at least 3 words/phrases from the word bank.

• You may combine words from the word bank.
• You could choose to replace words in your draft, or write more into the existing lines.

At this stage, if you get ideas for multiple start points, end lines, titles capture all in your notes!

Reminder: The goal for this rewrite is to shift language that feels stuck.

Exercise 2: Shift the frame

The Poetry Foundation Track Changes

“The Moore of 1924 declares that art can never be ‘neat’ or ‘finished,’ that intellectual discovery is always, by nature, changing, messy,”…. the poetry would “reveal something of the messy distances and differences”

Look at the latest/both versions of the piece you have, annotate the following (10-15 minutes)

• Who is the speaker?
• Who/what is this piece trying to speak about or speak to?
• Who is the intended reader/audience?
• Who/what is the supporting cast of this piece?
• What is the time, place, and context this piece primarily occurs in?

Rewrite 2 (10-15 minutes)

Your task for this rewrite is to identify at least one frame (character, context, core of the poem) and shift it! You may choose to shift it by an inch, or flip it on its head.

What is the character/intended audience became the speaker?

What if you started from the middle or the end?

What if you lost a sense of time?

What if it felt more chaotic / peaceful?

What if you made it more / less informative?

What if the reader had less context, or a different one?

Reminder: The goal for this rewrite is to shift meaning.

Exercise 3: Containerize this

The New York Times Poetry in Action (Published 2017)

Look at the latest/all the versions of your piece, what poetry devices might we unlock for our final version? (5 minutes)

• Every poem has a structure, write it at the top to remind yourself what you intend to write
• What can we lean into as a container once we set our structural intent → alliteration to bring bounce, punctuation to manage the flow, line breaks to reveal the structure, is there a metaphor that’s emerged as a through-line from all your versions, if yes, is that in the title/the start/the end?
• Is it a list poem, a portrait poem, a prose poem… After holding versions of it, which one is holding you?

Once you identify the intent, write out the attributes of it.

Ex. I wrote "Misremembering" as the intent of my poem - an attribute of that could be stumbling, shorter, broken lines (vs core, concrete, chronologically, sound detailed lines); in structure this could be shorter verses or potentially a prose poem with spacing to represent the fragments.

Rewrite 3 (10-15 minutes)

Your task for the final rewrite is to frame the container that most suits what your poem wants to be, look like and read like. You may choose to do a mix and match from all your versions here - ex. the title of one, the lines of another.

Reminder: The goal of this rewrite is to shift structure.

End note:

We end today with 1 word for the mindset/feeling you’re in with your poem (and all its versions) right now. If you have a favorite version, capture that too.

If these tools help, please comment/send me your iterations, would love to read them <3

We meet again virtually with some new, some similar exercises next month (and every month of 2025), come join us:

How Many Version - October

How Many Versions - November

How Many Versions - December

Acknowledgments:

Thank you the wonderful humans who showed up to very first edition of this workshop today, whose brave playfulness and generosity with one another has stuck with me.

This workshop is part of a series of fundraisers for the Chicago Poetry Center’s 51st year, to help fund 50 poetry residencies for Chicago public school students. If you’ve read this far, I hope you consider donating any amount that is personally meaningful to you <3

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