This one-day, in-person workshop with award-winning poet and editor Claire Albrecht is a playful, slightly rebellious experiment in what happens when we stop trying to be “good” poets for a few hours, and then very deliberately start trying again from a different perspective.

Participants will go through a two-part creative experiment: first loosening the grip of imagined editorial judgement, then consciously re-engaging it. They will leave with two separate poems: one gloriously unpublishable poem that belongs only to them, and one deliberately publishable poem that may be related to the first or completely different—plus a toolkit for moving between uninhibited creation and strategic craft without losing what makes their work distinctive.

This progression isn’t about sanding off everything strange or original. It’s about learning how to consciously shape a poem for a real-world publishing context while keeping it vivid and distinctive. We’ll focus on practical revision and drafting strategies, audience awareness, and how editorial decision-making actually works, with an emphasis on how to preserve voice and authenticity.

Spoiler: We might just find that participants’ “unpublishable” poems are in fact quite publishable after all, for the right editor…