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2009 Winter Writing Retreat

     “Being a poet is about articulating your humanness,” stated Darrell Bourque, professor emeritus at the University of Louisiana – Lafayette and poet laureate for the state of Louisiana, as he opened the 2009 Winter Writing Retreat at the Solomon Episcopal Center in Laranger, Louisiana Saturday, January 31, 2009.  To an audience of seasoned LSU Writing Project teacher-consultants, Bourque read a variety of poems written by contemporary and time-honored poets, immersing the retreat participants in the language of poetry as they developed a bank of words for poem-sketching.  After a bit of discussion of the rhetoric of poetry – diction, line, sentence, trope, sound, and argument, Bourque sent the participants writing first draft free verse poems, inspired by their personal realms.  As the day progressed, with each new writing prompt – personal photographs, works of renowned artists, works of personal art, favorite lines of poems, film – the retreat participants' poems transcended from “the merely personal to the deeply personal” as they explored their own deep roots of family life, culture, and the binding ties of humanity.
     Along with the picturesque setting, enthusiastic participants who felt comfortable with the idea of writing, and the ample opportunity, it was truly a wonderful occasion for teachers to write!  Because there is no one way to teach writing, the participants of the 2009 Winter Writing Retreat took back to their classrooms the knowledge they gained through Bourque’s method of "awakening the poetry from within" technique and placed it among their already tried and true methods of relating to students.        
     For a sampling of writings done during the weekend retreat, click on the links to those LSU Writing Project teacher-consultants who contributed.

        Margret Atkinson           Darrell Bourque             Mary Guarisco
        Joan Robbins                Larry Savery                 Sara Sims
        Laura Theriot                 Lynn Thompson            Elizabeth Willis

Louisiana State University Writing Project
118 William Hatcher Hall
Baton Rouge, LA  70803

E-mail us at:
jrobbins@lsuwritingproject.org