Straight Workshoppin

The Sep/Oct issue of Poets & Writers has a curious article by poet and professor John Poch ("Pimp My Writing") in which he compares the workshop he teaches to an episode of MTV's Pimp My Ride. This is awkward, to say the least, though it does yield some interesting, statistically improbable phrases, such as "Did Ezra Pound pimp T.S. Eliot's ride when he helped him with one of the greatest poems of the last century, 'The Waste Land'?"

I don't mind odd comparisons, but in exploring the challenges of a creative writing workshop, Poch manages to find fault in everyone but himself, from the kids on Pimp My Ride ("You know he's going to chop the car up into pieces and sell the parts on eBay. If he doesn't, the stuff's just going to get stolen or smashed by his jealous friends. The kid is probably pretty lazy. Just look at the car he'd been driving.") to Americans in general ("Americans want it easy. We want to win the lottery. We want somebody to pimp our rides for us.") to his students in particular ("What's the solution when a teacher has to confront unimaginative minds?").

I've never met any of Poch's students so I can't confirm whether they're as dim as he thinks. As for Americans, sure many of us want it easy, but so does most of the rest of humanity. And I think it goes without saying that laziness is not the only reason that the kids featured on Pimp My Ride drive busted up cars.

What I can say is that Poch consistently contrasts his own virtues against everybody else's vices. "All I did during the semester was pimp their rides," he says of his students' poems. "And I'm pretty good at it.... I'm like the sound technician who has been working with woofers and tweeters for years.... I can trick out your poem. Shoot, I can even stick some neon lights under the poem's chassis if I put my mind to it." When he remarks on his own faults, it's mostly to show how he has grown past them and become a better person as a result.

In the end, the conclusion Poch comes to isn't a bad one: "Creative writing teachers who want to best teach the art must strike a balance. The teacher must weigh offering suggestions with remaining silent, general discussion with exposure to the masters," he writes. Sure, sounds great. But the best creative writing teachers are also those who don't go into the workshop assuming that all of their students are a bunch of lazy, entitled, unimaginative morons.

Stanley Plumly on Poetry

The summer after my junior year in college, I spent several weeks in a writing seminar series in Prague. The poet Stanley Plumly was the leader of workshop group I joined and, as I mentioned in a previous post, he refused to allow anyone in it to treat the writing of poems lightly, even if it was the summer, and Prague, and all very romantic. He reviled lazy writing and did not hesitate to cast judgment on the poems we brought before him. Tears were not uncommon. I recall one or two people dropping out of the class.

Having someone take my poems seriously was just what I wanted, and I quickly learned to welcome his criticism -- I figured that the sooner I could identify and understand where the words went wrong, the sooner I could set them right. He taught me that the poem matters and the poet does not, or not much. In the end, he also provided me the support and genuine encouragement to continue writing, and in that way he was kind. His guidance helped me get my first publication--of a poem he critiqued--in a national journal, the Ohio Review. I suspect he isn't aware what a difference that class made to me.

Throughout the workshop I tried to write down everything Plumly had to say about writing poetry. I forgot about all of those quotes until this morning, when I came across them in an old notebook. They're still illuminating and I think they're worth sharing here:

[On the writing process:] “I sit there a lot, in silence, like a good quaker.”

“There’s no such thing as omniscience in poetry; God doesn’t need to write poems.”

“Use form for tension.”

“The hardest thing is to resist therapy.”

“Ninety-nine percent of the time, poetry is about losing.”

“Poetry is about making a world, however small it is.”

“You can’t live on only the energy and emotion of your art—it will eat you alive.”

“Remember there are only small things, and you are a small thing among them.”

“The poem has to live in your world, not just in your private consciousness.”

“Embrace the object. Do not lose sight of that objective.”

“Language ought to be a transparency over experience; what we don’t want is a linguistic opacity.”

“If you write badly, it’s because you don’t know, you aren’t focused, you aren’t being honest, or you aren’t feeling it.”

“Editing is a way of rewriting, the emptying of a previously filled space.”

“Beware commentary; when you enter a poem, you’re in there—you can’t go out again.”

“Cliche comes in when we’re in a hurry to get somewhere else.”

“Work against the material.”

“[in poetry, answer:] What is your problem right now? Where does it hurt?”

“So much about writing is getting to what needs to be written.”

“Everything in a poem has to be answered... or unanswered.”

“You mustn’t treat your experience as if it only happened to you.”

A Workshop Poem

William Packard, who taught creative writing in New York for more than 40 years, has a cutting section on workshops in his curmudgeonly, old-school tome The Art of Poetry Writing. I couldn't resist reprinting a poem by Norman Stock that he finds illustrative of their faults:

Thank You for
the Helpful Comments

I sit quietly listening
as they tear my poem to shreds in the poetry workshop
as each one says they have a "problem" with this line

and they have a "problem" with that line

and I am not allowed to speak because that is the
etiquette of the workshop
so I sit listening and writing while they tear the
guts out of my poem and leave it lying bleeding and dead
and when they're finally finished having kicked the
stuffing out of it
having trimmed it down from twenty lines to about four
words that nobody objects to
then they turn to me politely and they say well Norman
do you have any response
response I say picking myself up off the floor and
brushing away the dirt while holding on for dear
life to what I thought was my immortal poem now
dwindled to nothing
and though what I really want to say is can I get my
money back for this stupid workshop what I say
instead is... uh... thank you for your helpful
comments... while I mumble under my breath
motherfuckers wait till I get to your poems

Sad but true. And hilarious.

Stafford's book, by the way, is better than most so-you-want-to-be-a-poet books. He's straightforward, if distant, and he takes a back to basics approach that emphasizes reading and discipline. He's not politically correct, he's not comprehensive, and he has a decidedly Western focus, but his determined attention to the fundamentals sets him apart.

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.

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.