A Patchwork Life

New twist: the museum where we have been running our workshop is having a little catered shindig to mark the end of the exhibit, and we poets are going to be reading from our work!

This will be my first time reading my poetry in front of an audience, or really, in front of anyone.  I’ve given talks this spring to two groups of about a hundred people each, and I’ve taught hundreds of times, and some of those times I’ve been teaching poetry.  But my own?  In front of strangers?  Yikes.  This also means I have to choose one of my poems.  Yikes, redux.

It does seem like one more justification for officially calling myself a poet, though.  Right?

!!!!!!

Expect more thrilled and anxious blogging between now and June 5th!

Workshop on Saturday was again good- I think we are becoming more comfortable with each other, more able to recognize a voice or pattern, more able to offer truly helpful and constructive criticism.  Some of us have even been sending out revised drafts of workshopped poems and asking for more feedback, which certainly implies a level of trust as well.  I think the chances are pretty good that some of us will end up continuing to work together after the workshop ends, which is good because we’re taking this week off for the holiday and then only have one class left!

It’s been lovely to see how these other poets work, too– what areas they struggle, what ambitions they have as writers, what their revision process is like.  Some of us are more enamored with form and structure, some of us craft dazzling opening lines, others string spare couplets along the page.   Observing them and their work processes, commenting on their drafts, has already taught me more about myself as a poet.  When I see the choices they make as poets, and compare them to choices I make or would have made, I learn more about how I see my work, how I like to use language, how my instincts respond to this adjective or this form of punctuation.

I always tell my own students that my goal as a teacher is create the kind of environment where they learn as much from each other as they do from me.  It’s certainly nice to be on the other side of that dynamic, soaking up whatever I can from my fellow students.

Today was our first workshop day– all of us had emailed copies of our poems to the group, commented on them, and then brought those copies and comments to the group today. We read our poems out loud, then heard comments, then had a minute or so to add or answer, then onto the next poet.

It’s a nerve-wracking experience– I wrote a poem about it actually in college, after my first fiction workshop– but a good and essential one, I believe. There’s an expression common to writers: “Murder your darlings,” from a speech by British author and critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who was also a professor at Cambridge (and what a great name, right? A real Harry Potter name). Whenever you find something particularly fine and lovely, you should think about eliminating it unless it’s absolutely necessary to your work. Murdering your darlings is an essential thing to do, and having other writers help you in that process is great, but revealing them to the light of day so that others can ruthlessly cut them down? Difficult, to say the least. But that’s what workshops are for, and learning not to take criticism personally is another essential step in the writerly journey. The comments I got today confirmed some phrases I had hoped were in the right place and helped me single out exactly which darlings needed to be on the chopping block.

Then we went upstairs again to walk through the exhibit and find fruit for next week’s poem, and I found myself drawn again to an Edward Weston photo, this one of sand dunes. After I had scribbled furiously in my notebook, I took myself to the gift shop next and bought the three postcards they had with his images– two more from the Pepper series and one of toadstools. I am really falling in love with his work, which is yet another reason I’m so glad I took this workshop.

I think my poem for next week is not a Weston piece though, but instead a piece by David Hare, better known as a sculptor and playwright, who experimented with photography and Surrealism. We’ll see how it goes– I started three poems today, but only one can be workshopped next week!