For over two years, three local poets—Becky Boling, D. E. (Doug) Green, and Libby Falk Jones—have been practicing J.D. McClatchy’s exercise, “writing between the lines,” in which each of us builds a poem from another poem, line by line. The original line can serve in any number of ways – image, sound, association, subject, word. The goal is not to paraphrase, but to let the line spark one’s own vision and words.
We take turns picking the seed poem, write independently, and compare our results—the variety and novelty of which, along with the process, we find fascinating and hope you will, too. We’ve completed over twenty sets of poems, drawing from such poets as Sappho, Frost, Neruda, Tretheway, Limon, and Northfield’s own Rob Hardy.
In this presentation and workshop, we’ll present three sets of our poems, along with the seed poems and brief comments, take questions from you, and give you the chance to try the exercise. We hope you’ll learn about poetic possibilities and a new, enlivening approach to writing your own poems.
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The Poets
Becky Boling started writing poetry in earnest after retirement from Carleton College. She’s served as co-Poet Laureate of Northfield (2023-2024) and published in journals & anthologies: Agates; Lost Lake Folk Opera; Connecticut River Review; Willows Wept Review; Little By Little, the Bird Builds Its Nest; ICE OUT: Minnesota Writers Rising Up; and We Look West: Five Poets of the Northfield Public Library. Here Beyond Small Wonders (FLP, 2025) is Boling’s first solo poetry book. (74)
Retired Augsburg Professor D. E. (Doug) Green has published poetry in print and online venues and in his books Jumping the Median, Catastrophizing in Catastrophe, and, with four fellow poets, We Look West. Recent poems appear in ICE OUT, Words to Meet the Moment, Lost Lake Folk Opera v10: United We Write, and When the World Shows a Wound, Poetry Shows a Light. With Becky Boling, Green has served as Northfield, Minnesota’s Co-Poet Laureate (2023-24).
Libby Falk Jones is author of four poetry collections, most recently Enchanting the Ordinary: Poems & Photographs (Broadstone, 2025). Winner of the 2026 Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize from The Heartland Review, she taught writing and literature for three decades at Berea College in Kentucky. Her poems appear locally this fall in Agates and in The House on the Hill, an anthology of work by members of Northfield Open Writers.
