Your Final Portfolios / Our Final Meeting

We've discussed this in class last week, but to reiterate for those of you who were absent (and there were quite a few of you), you'll be expected to hand in a final portfolio at the end of the term.  This will include the following things:

1. Revisions of 5-6 poems that you wrote this term (either poems that were workshopped formally or poems that you wrote in response to our various prompts), including both the original and revised versions along with a brief explanation (a few sentences for each) of what changes you made, how workshop comments affected your alterations, etc.
2. Two (2) copies of your finished chapbook (for me), plus a copy for everyone else in the workshop (so 19 copies altogether) — you can make it an even 20 (at the bare minimum) so you'll have a copy for yourself. * 
3. Proof of having submitted work to at least one literary journal (other than Short Vine).
4. A final evaluation of your experience in our workshop (details below).

* However,  I encourage you to make a larger set (say 40-50 copies) so you can distribute them to friends and family.  While printing/photocopying costs will increase in this case, you won't really be spending more in terms of paper, cover stock, etc. as you'll be buying a lot more than you'll use, even if you split with a few classmates.

For your final evaluation, I'd like you to answer the following questions, with your overall essay running to about 2.5-3 pages in length:

1. In what ways have your poetics — or the way in which you think about poetry, it's meaning, its usefulness, etc. — changed over the course of this workshop?  How would you describe your poetics now?
2. Have your compositional habits changed at all due to this workshop, and if so, how?  What prompt(s) did you find most useful and which one(s) could you just not get into?
3. Did this workshop live up to your expectations (or, perhaps, exceed them)?  What would you say were the most useful things that you'll take away from this experience?

Also, it goes without saying that you should be caught up with any and all workshop evaluations of your classmates, and should have posted responses to at least 8 of the 10 workshop prompts I've posted throughout the quarter.

We won't be having a final in this class, but I'd like to make use of the time that's allotted to us for a final for one last meeting as a group — especially since our last class during week 10 will be taken up mostly with workshopping our final poets.   Our final is scheduled for 1:30-3:30 on Thursday, March 17th and will take place in our usual classroom, so we'll meet then and there. Like any other final, I'd like to stress this as a mandatory meeting and therefore hope that there won't be any issues in regards to absence.  During this meeting time, everyone will distribute their chapbooks to the rest of the workshop and we'll spend a little time looking them over and talking about the process of making them.  We'll also spend some time summing up our experiences throughout the quarter, guided by your responses to the self-evaluation above.

I'm being somewhat generous in that I'd originally intended to have everyone turn in at least some of these materials — at the very least, the chapbooks — during the last week of class, and as a result you'll have an extra week to work on both.  In return for this extra time, I must insist that everyone is present for our final meeting and ready with everything that needs to be handed in (and failing to do this will have negative consequences).

We can talk about all of this briefly tomorrow before moving on to our workshop poems.