Cahal Dallat writes:
Great Poets in the past often worked together, edited each other's work or talked for hours in the Cheshire Cheese or walked on Hampstead Heath or dined at Dove Cottage and rhapsodised on the importance of their art and experimented together with new techniques…. Which is all very well if youÕre great and famous and inspired and happen to know Shelley and Keats, or even John Ashberry, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney and regularly get invited to dinner.
For most people trying to write poems in the real world today it's unlikely that all their friends and neighbours, or colleagues at work, or members of their hockey team, are also poets. So a poetry workshop is anywhere a number of poets get together to discuss each other's work, usually – but not always – in an atmosphere of support and shared enthusiasm for poetry.