Archive for the ‘Poetry Workshops’ Category
Entry 676 — A Reaction to a Post to New-Poetry
Tuesday, March 6th, 2012
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Stephen Russell had some interesting posts concerning thoughts of Donald Hall at New-Poetry yesterday, one of which included the following “defining sentence of Hall’s”:
Although in theory workshops serve a useful purpose in gathering young artists together, workshop practices enforce the McPoem.
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Stephen also quoted Hall speaking of a poetry workshop assignment as follows: “Write a poem without adjectives, or without prepositions, or without content” These formulas, everyone says, are a whole lot of fun. They also reduce poetry to a parlor game; they trivialize and make safe-seeming the real terrors of real art.
My response:
College workshops or the equivalent in all subjects gather together young apprentices in their subjects and teach what the conventional understanding at the time of the subject. A poetry workshop will enforce the McPoem only on those without the natural aptitude to do other kinds of poems. Amusingly, while Hall’s poems may not be “McPoems,” they most certainly are Wilshberian. Most workshops, like most anything, will be less than super-effective, but most will be okay.
I think asking poets, journeymen as well as apprentices, to write poems without adjectives or—better—without either verbs or nouns, is a great idea. (I wouldn’t know how to write a poem without conetent; no doubt Hall was making a little joke.) Basically such “games” are the main value of the genuine language poem, one of the very few significant alternatives we have to the McPoem. Another, of course, is adding non-verbal elements to poems. If composing poetry isn’t a game for you (however serious a one), I would wonder why you’re bothering with it.
It just now struck me that a big problem with the whole idea of teaching poetry is that you will end, as in the teaching of just about any subject, with many mediocre journeymen who will never significantly improve, or stray from what the status quo is in their field. This is a problem in poetry that it is not in other fields because there’s no real place in society for mediocre poets other than in teaching (or maybe at Hallmark). In engineering, for instance, there’s a strong demand for mediocre engineers—engineers, that is, who can carry out engineering tasks conventionally but soundly. Many mediocre composers can be used in orchestras and bands. There are many openings, too, for good but uninspired representational visual artists.
Seems to me that all that is most wrong with college poetry programs could be taken care of with one widely-circulated decent college anthology of poetry—that included decent criticism of poetry. I won’t define what I think would be a decent anthology because I know how annoying that would be. I will say it would contain a fair amount of Wilshberian poems—and McPoems.
Stephen replied: “True, it’s a wonderful game. But Hall’s spin was interesting. This essay should be included in his greatest hits.
Me: “Yeah. I give him points for being instrumental in getting that discussion (and a few other good ones) going—although, sure, like everything else, poor versions of it have been repeated ad nauseam. Hey, how’s this for my motto for Teaching an Introductory Course in Poetry: Expose your students to as wide a range of poetry as you can, with passion for your favorites, and against the ones you like least.
“I think the best way to capture students for poetry is to express passion in favor of those poems you love; the second-best way is to express passion against those poems you hate. A certain percentage of your best students will automatically dive into the latter—those biologically incapable of not reacting against authority. Oddly, I genuinely can’t think of a kind of poetry I hate, but could find quite I few individual poems I don’t like at all. The expression of pssionate confusion would be good to—as in ‘What in the world is Gertrude trying to say or do here?’”
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