Lit Fest - Lighthouse Writers Workshop 2026

The popular image of the poet is as a dasher off of poem drafts. So manic and mercurial are poets’ imaginations that not even champion typists can keep abreast of them. If there’s a problem, it’s something to which they can return in a quiet moment way down the road. The focus of this week will be to set ourselves against this popular image, to make every moment a quiet moment, to fix problems as they arise, to revise even as the poem’s vision for itself is slowly coming into being and, in the end, to cut down on a lot of unnecessary work. The key to this approach is to write the poem one line at a time, to allow one idea to lead to another, and to avoid getting ahead of ourselves. When we implement this approach, the poem is now, paradoxically, more likely to bring us to a place of genuine immediacy and vitality which had hitherto been illusory.