Good poems usually take time to develop, but we can help them along with a little patience, persistence, and attention. Locating the strong and weak passages in your work is essential to the writing process. Once you find the poetry in your poem, it is important to stick with it, to let it discover its way to completion. We will look at poems with an eye and ear toward understanding whether or not they deliver what they promise. Criticism will be supportive-aimed at locating the strength of the poem and building on it. There will be exercises to trigger new work from the poems you have written as well as to help you push your poems through successive drafts toward completion.