During the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, July 12-19, 2009, Mark Doty will be leading a workshop for poets who are ready to assemble a group of related poems into a chapbook manuscript.
 
Questions that Mark will pose include, In what ways can poems be “related”? What gives a collection a sense of coherence, and what keeps that unity from becoming dull?

"Participants in this group will share their chapbook manuscripts with one another and with the workshop leader two weeks before the conference, so that we’ll have time to carefully consider each person’s work," Mark says. "Then, we'll discuss these chapbooks-in-progress in our workshop meetings."  

Mark Doty is one of the world's finest poets. “If it were mine to invent the poet to complete the century of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, I would create Mark Doty just as he is, a maker of big, risky, fearless poems in which ordinary human experience becomes music,” Philip Levine wrote.

Mark is the author of eight books of poems, among them "Fire to Fire," "School of the Arts," "Source," and "My Alexandria." He has also published four volumes of nonfiction prose: "Still Life with Oysters and Lemon," "Heaven's Coast," "Firebird," and "Dog Years," which was a New York Times bestseller in 2007.

Doty lives in New York City and in Houston, Texas, where he is John and Rebecca Moores Professor in the graduate program at the University of Houston.

Registration for this workshop is available by following this link, or by calling Centrum at 360.385.3102, x114.