Spying on Poets
So this last month I have been spying on poets in a poetry classes, and I am blown away. To be honest I had always thought the difference between fiction writers and poets to be pretty marginal; maybe a shorter attention span, maybe a little bit more emotional than the average bear, or maybe just stronger affinity towards the avant garde. I mean all writers I know dabble in poetry no matter what their preferred genre is but prose writers tend to write poetry in notebooks and never show anyone. We say things like “I don’t really get poetry but I like it,” or “I can’t tell whether it’s good or not,” but we all have written poetry for fun at one point or another. So what is it that makes one writer a poet and one a prose writer?
At first I was a little disappointed with my classes. I thought I would go in and finally have an epiphany about what poetry was supposed to be and what the goal of writing it was. Instead it felt like a very kind but unproductive workshop. People simply lit up. People I had never heard speak or show any emotions were excited. They complimented images and the strengths of lines or stanzas. I don’t think the praise given was false or gratuitous in any way either, it felt genuine. They talked about strong versus weak line breaks and rarely did anyone say that a line should just be flat-out cut without what could be done to make it stronger and whenever this did happen, someone immediately argued for necessity of that line in just as convincing way as those opposed to the line in question. I left class somewhat confused and also elated, maybe even vindicated. They seemed to be just as clueless and ungrounded in what they were doing as I was. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for any of it. Then as the weeks went on my confidence improved and I felt like I could say with some authority that I didn’t like this or I didn’t like that. The other prose writers, I believe were in the same boat. We started dropping you need to cut this or the emotional core of this is not quite there. But the poets continued singing the praises of what they were reading with an unbelievable optimism that every poem was just a few changes shy of greatness.
Then this week the poets started criticizing the poetry in the same way the prose writers were, without the optimism I had grown to love about them. My first thought was, oh my God we’ve ruined them. Truthfully that is a little egotistical to think that my presence in any of these classes could have an affect like that. It was probably just the middle of the term catching up to people, the post holiday winter blues, or maybe even a full moon. But I did realize that there is something different going on in the way poets think. And while I still don’t think I have a strong handle on poetry or writing poetry, there is something to be said for the optimism and fun that poets have with writing and reading.
Hm. Maybe it’s just that group that is optimistic and fun. I didn’t necessarily experience those two things in poetry workshops.
I’m with Shira. I loved our workshops, and learned a lot from them, but they were hostile and combative as often as they were optimistic and fun.
I played a role in this no doubt, as at times I can be a bit of a slash-and-burn type reader. I mean, as Jeremy Halinen will tell you from our work at Willow Springs and Knockout, when we edit a poem for publication, we might change a few lines, or we might kill five stanzas. And I don’t think we do it with an illusion of helping the author reach perfection. It just depends on context of the original work and what we can do to (hopefully) improve it.
And we learned a lot of that from the workshop, I think.
Hell, when we get bad poems for KO, we read them out loud in the “poetry voice,” a strategy we learned from EWU’s own Sam Ligon.
(By the way, if you’ve ever got the blues, get a black turtleneck, a beret, a bottle of Three Buck Chuck and some bad poetry. Live the cliche, and amuse your friends.)
I’m one of those prose writers that like poetry but don’t quite get it. When I took a poetry workshop last summer, what blew my mind was how paying attention to the not just the sentence level, but the word level can totally change the meaning and experience of your writing.
My favorite way of experiencing poetry is to have poets read their or other writers’ work. When I read poetry on my own, I don’t feel the same connection ot the words. Maybe I need to try Brett’s advice and get the right outfit and drink. Does the method work with good poetry as well as bad?
I like the idea of spying on poets. And how they refuse to be ruined.
And just keep driving shittily and crying.
I don’t know about crying, but I have noticed that poets–not to make a sweeping generalization or anything–are horrible drivers.
Not all of them, probably. Not you, Shira.
Sam, didn’t your FB status say something about getting a ticket the other day? :-)
Yes, yes. And I know all poets aren’t really horrible drivers.
The crying comment came from when Cranky Editor yelled at young woman at the book table and made book table sitter cry. Sam, you said the cryer had to be a poet. It turned out, however, that she wasn’t.
I know I’m not overly positive in workshop. You must have some sweet peers in that class, Carly. The difference between poets and prose writers?? Poets terrible drivers (I admit it about myself anyway) because our brains work in layers; we’re always thinking about the word, the line, the sound, the form, the rhythm, the meaning…. How can anyone possibly think about all that and stop at stop signs??
I think even the most fun-hating, fun-ruining of a person would be forced into fun-having in Chris’s Surrealism class. There’s just no avoiding it.