Travel Writing is...

... not as interesting when you're only going to New York for a conference. Yet that's where I'm headed for most of this week, which unfortunately almost guarantees zero productivity from a writing standpoint.

I don't know how writers who travel frequently manage to work despite the disruption it causes. I guess they must get used it, but for me it seems almost impossible. The distractions are endless, the process exhausting. That said, I do find that I tend to return from trips with new ideas for poems, so it's not a total loss. We'll see if this trip finds me coming home with souvenirs. I'll let you know next Sunday or Monday.

Also, late last week I sent another batch of poems to my readers. This is the ninth group I've asked them to review, and I expect to send at least two more before A Writing Year is up. I'm excited about these recent poems and looking forward to getting feedback.

Poems a la Netflix

Three new poems for my readers this morning. As I mentioned in my email to them, it's all a little like Netflix. They send the old ones back and get new ones a few days later. Of course, the poems don't have quite the same entertainment value as, for example, "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" (currently #2 on the Netflix Top 100). Well, perhaps a Brad Pitt / Angelina Jolie / married assassins poem is in the offing. Oh, it's possible. Here's a Brad Pitt poem to prove it, courtesy of Aaron Smith.

Huzzah for the Readers

As I continue to get feedback from my motley crew of readers, I'm thrilled with their honest, probing assessments and their refusal to let me get away with any laziness. So far each of them has pointed out something I hadn't noticed or acknowledged before, not just in the poems themselves but in my fundamental approach to writing as well. That's a great thing, and I can't thank them enough for their time and insights.

This virtual workshop also has the interesting effect of disaggregating everyone's responses. In a typical writing workshop, it's hard to avoid the urge to arrive at some consensus about whatever is being discussed, which means that the participants may unconsciously censor any comments that run counter to the direction of the group's collective judgment or emphasize those that align with it. That's just human nature. However, my readers are all responding privately via email, so I get their undiluted opinions, and it's fascinating to see how various facets of the poems stand out to each of them differently.

Finding My Voice (Cue the Enya)

My friend Lucas observed that the first group of poems I sent to my readers span a range of styles. In his response to me, he suggested that this was either an indication of my great virtuosity or evidence of internal conflict about the kind of work I'd like to produce.

Much as I'd like to believe the former is true, his conjecture about my conflicting thoughts on what and how I want to write is probably more accurate. It's not an unfamiliar conflict for me though -- I've always been torn between various different types of writing and felt a genuine interest in the possibilities offered by them all (or nearly all). One day I'm pulled toward Frost and his focus on plain speech and sentence sounds. The next I read Kay Ryan and want to write twisting, crystalline observations. And a day later the complex grammatical mechanisms of John Donne and Carl Phillips seem the only things worth creating.

As a result, I end up exploring all of these styles and others as well. At this point, I think that's the right thing to be doing, but there is the problem of coherence, and I don't relish the thought of seesawing back and forth between styles forever.

Poetry People always talk about "finding your voice," and I despise the touchy-feelyness that encumbers the phrase. I think when most people say it, they have in mind a kind of beatific blossoming. It seems like something that a lot of scented candles and dreamcatchers would help. (Plus, how do you know when you've found it? Is there a bell of some kind? A glowing light? Enya?) Still, I have to admit that I see the basic idea behind it as a central challenge for me this year. I have a multitude of voices in my head that I need to corral together into a single shouting crowd.

And that's the thing -- I don't feel that I should have to choose between these voices or among the many schools of poetry. For me, "finding my voice" means figuring out the kinds of rhythms, sounds, words and images that blend together best, that express the way I see the world, and that approximate, if always imperfectly, the unachievable, a priori poem that is behind everything I write. The real challenge is focusing, and listening, and working hard. Maybe in the end it's not so much that you find your voice as your voice finds you. No Enya necessary.

Meet the Readers

I'm thinking of A Writing Year as a do-it-yourself MFA, and no MFA would be complete without the workshop, would it? Workshops are often maligned, and anyone who's taken a creative writing class or attended a writer's conference knows why -- they tend to devolve into therapy sessions, support groups, circle jerks, etc., and if unchecked they can result in a kind of writing-by-committee. In his essay "Poetry and Ambition," Donald Hall characterizes the poetry workshop as, "a garage to which we bring incomplete or malfunctioning homemade machines for diagnosis and repair." Mark Strand, in a class I had with him a couple years ago, remarked, "I was in a workshop once. I found that even when a poem was praised it was depressing."

Despite such aspersions, workshops do have merit in that they offer writers a (hopefully) open forum to discuss their work and receive criticism from others engaged in the same endeavor. They also provide some good old fashioned motivation (you have to produce something) and serve as a walking, talking, and sometimes nit-picking reminder that your work cannot be totally hermetic -- in some way, it has to engage these people.

The best workshops are led by dedicated writers who push the participants hard and are forthright in their comments. By far the best workshop I've ever been in was one led by the poet Stanley Plumly, who was known to make people cry. He wasn't mean-spirited, just honest, and he would champion good work as much as he would rip apart the bad. To me, it was a sign of his respect for us as writers that he looked at our work with such a critical eye. Why shouldn't we meet his standards?

In any case, I knew when I started thinking about AWY that I wanted some semblance of this workshop experience. I haven't found an actual writer's group I'm interested in joining in Chicago (yet), so instead I've convened my own little group of readers to give me feedback. All are friends, but not all are writers themselves. What they share are smarts, general artistic inclinations, and a god-bless-'em willingness to tolerate my early drafts. Let me introduce them briefly, in no particular order:

Jeff Navicky and I met in Prague in 1999, where we were roommates during a summer writing seminar series. We've been reading each other's work ever since. When we both lived in New York, we led a writer's group called 4140 that met every other week or so at the Cedar Tavern. Jeff earned his MFA in poetry from Naropa University in Colorado and now lives in Portland, Maine. His chapbook Map of the Second Person is available from Black Lodge Press.

Nell Henderson is a fellow creative writing alum of Middlebury College. Nell was also a member of 4140 (see above) and has always been a truly insightful reader, not to mention a great friend. She recently received an MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia and now teaches writing and American Literature at James Madison University. Her students are lucky to have her.

Lars Soderkvist works in freelance art direction and production here in Chicago. Although we've been acquainted only a short while, he has a sophisticated aesthetic perspective and promises to be a great addition to the group.

Lucas Klein and I have been friends since college. We have very different writing styles and ideas about poetry, but the contrasts work for us, or at least make for interesting arguments. Lucas' abilities as a critic (and as a poet) are formidable. Currently, he's a Ph.D. candidate in the department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He runs an online literary journal focused on translation, Cipher Journal, and also hosts CipherBlog.

Nicholas Merchant-Bleiberg used to live in Chicago but recently moved to Brooklyn, where he works as the assistant principal of a charter school. In addition to Saving Our Children From A Life Of Poverty And Crime, he is a talented painter (of canvases, not drywall).

And of course I would be remiss not to mention my lovely wife Jen, who is in the regrettable position of having to read or hear my poems before anybody else does. Readers, because of her you will be spared many a pained phrase this year.

So that's the team. I anticipate sending them 2-3 poems every couple of weeks, or at least once a month. In fact, the first batch goes out today. All of these people lead busy lives, so I've told them they should respond to whatever extent their time and interest allows, whether that means a quick email with gut reactions or a line-by-line analysis with reading suggestions. I'm just grateful someone's listening.