Propagation and Play: Generative Revision Strategies for Poetry

Maker, Mentor, Muse & Alta Mesa Center for the Arts Presents

Propagation and Play: Generative Revision Strategies for Poetry
led by Noelani Piters
Sunday, May 17th - 4pm-6pm PDT
Zoom

Proceeds from this workshop will go to Lāhui Foundation’s Post-Flood Recovery Efforts to help families affected by the Kona Low storm events in March 2026.

Propagation is the act of taking part of a plant — leaf, stem, root — to grow a new one. In this 2-hour workshop, we’ll take cuttings from our original poem drafts and approach revision through play.

We’ll frankenstein, flip, and fragment our poems. We’ll ask questions, give poems new names, erase and multiply and collage our words. We’ll learn to abandon anxiety about editing what’s on the page and embrace possibility. Designed to get us out of our own heads, these exercises will help us take drafts in unexpected directions and, most importantly, find joy in the revision process.

This class is on a sliding scale from $55-105, and these proceeds will be donated to Lāhui Foundation’s Post-Flood Recovery Efforts to help families affected by the Kona Low storm events in March 2026. You can also sign up for the recording only for $40. 

ABOUT YOUR INSTRUCTOR

Noelani Piters is a writer of Kanaka ‘Ōiwi, Chinese, and haole descent living in San Francisco. A recipient of fellowships from Indigenous Nations Poets, VONA, and PEN America, she was a finalist for the 2025 James Welch Prize, and a 2023 Molokai Arts Center Artist in Residence. Her work can be found in Zyzzyva, Poetry Northwest, The Hopkins Review, Poetry, swamp pink, and elsewhere. She is at work on a poetry manuscript exploring the fragmentation of diasporic, mixed identity in the wake of familial loss and colonial rupture, and its restorying through the ancestral, the archival, and the ‘āina.

Maker, Mentor, Muse is a teaching platform founded in 2022 by Mary Volmer, Maw Shein Win, and Dawn Angelicca Barcelona. Hailing from three distinct backgrounds, generations, and spiritual traditions we believe community is essential to building a satisfying and sustainable literary life and that true success requires balancing all three artistic roles: maker, mentor, muse. In collaboration with Alta Mesa Center for the Arts, sponsored by Orinda Community Church, we are building a place where artists embrace practices that honor process, spiritual growth, connection, and ongoing community with other writers.

Alta Mesa Center for the Arts is an interfaith arts and spirituality hub, housed and sponsored by Orinda Community Church and in partnership with Maker, Mentor Muse. Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.