Decades ago, Lyn Coffin was on the SLAM team Ann Arbor sent to the National competition in Austin, Texas. She was inspired by the many great performance poems she heard and has a deep love of performance poetry, as well as “academic” or formal poetry. Almost the entire class will be devoted to workshopping the sound and the rhythm of participants’ work, after a brief talk about performance poetry characteristics and a few writing prompts. Participants are invited to submit a “performance” poem, or a page poem they feel could make a good performance piece. Students will read their pieces and Lyn will suggest ways to improve both the reading of the text and the text itself. Participants should come out of this class with better performance pieces.