It's common knowledge that the end words of poetic lines carry special emphasis and weight in creating a poem's meaning and that a poem's final word bear even more. In this workshop, we'll look together at some ways that attention to end words can help us revisit and restructure poems, from the relatively simple approach of simply highlighting final words to determine which ones are working hard enough, to more complicated formal devices which emphasize end words even more, like head rhyme, echo verse, and contrapuntal verse. Participants are asked to bring a poem (either hard copy or digital) on which they're still working, with which they're not yet fully satisfied, so that they have the option to apply some of these approaches to their own work during the workshop. Digital handouts provided.
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CATHERINE CARTER’s poetry collections include Larvae of the Nearest Stars, The Swamp Monster at Home, The Memory of Gills (all with LSU Press), and two chapbooks with Jacar Press.  Her work has also appeared in Best American Poetry, Orion, Poetry, Ploughshares, RHINO, Ecotone, and North American Review, among others.  She is a professor of English at Western Carolina University in the Great Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina. On a good day, she can re-queen a hive of honeybees and roll a whitewater kayak; on less good days, she collects stings, rock rash, and multiple contusions