Carrie Etter’s Poetry Workshop at Devizes Arts Festival

By Helen Edwards

American poet, Carrie Etter has been a resident in England since 2001, and a reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She published four collections, most recently, The Weather in Normal, and numerous chapbooks. On Saturday Carrie gave a poetry workshop and reading at Devizes Town Hall, as a fringe event of Devizes Arts Festival…..

โ€˜Carrieโ€™s workshop was absolutely fantastic, a distilled overview of prose poetry with many examples to show the variation in style and our own time to create (with no pressure).ย  Carrie was inspiring, impassioned and quick as a whip.

Her students at Bristol University are very lucky to have her as a teacher (as were her many past students from at Bath Spa University). The open mic at the end was inclusive, supportive and fun. Carrieโ€™s final poem saw me wiping away tears; beautiful.

I wish I could write a longer review but I am doing this one-eyed with a poorly optic nerve. Iโ€™m effervescing with words which will have to wait or be dictaphoned, when they come I now have many tips as to how to form them better.ย  Thanks Carrie, your generosity is abundant – Iโ€™ve a feeling youโ€™ll get a roomfulโ€™s worth of follow up messages. Helen.


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