My Reader Thinks about Me, Part 2 (4.25.21)

As a follow-up to the previous post, here is the project for Wednesdays@One this coming week.  

Go deep as you can into your stash of poems and drafts to find a poem you wrote that you haven't thought about in a very long time.  So long in fact, that you might not quite recognize it were you to see it in some other context, like another person's journal entry or published in a magazine.  (Of course, you will recognize the poem as yours--who forgets the fruits of her own labor, eh?  But it should be one you can experience with a kind of "Oh, my!  I didn't know I could write that way!"  For better or worse.)

But the idea is to re-visit a piece of work that you just might be able to experience as a reader, and not so narrowly as its author; a piece whose impetus you may not recall today, whose struggle to birth might be only a faint memory, and whose first-draft high is long, long gone.

The poem may not match your current style or interest.  It may not even be finished.  It's possible you're not especially proud of it now.  That's okay because the point of this project is to look at your own work as a reader, as if reading the whole poem for the first time.  As I say, this is probably not possible; but I'm hoping that each of us can begin to approach our work this objectively, without some of the "baggage" of creation (original experience, ego, intent) that subjects always bring to their own work.

On Wednesday, then, instead of discussing each other's work as we usually do, I'm going to ask you to read your own poem to the group and then explain your experience re-visiting it after so long a time.  I am going to ask the group not to offer up critiques of the poem, but instead to ask questions, line by line, what you felt or thought or otherwise discovered upon revisiting your poem.  In this vein, let's all try to stick to the following guidelines:

• No advice about where and how to improve the poem.
• Consider questions about style (such as word choice and syntax, a poem's sonic quality, page real estate, etc.): Is there anything about this poem that, in re-reading it after so long a time, strike you as better than, not as good as, or otherwise different from the way you write today?
• Consider questions about subject or how the subject is treated.  For instance, are the voice and tone of voice in this poem similar to what you do today in a poem?  Does the poem offer a point of view that you don't adopt now when you write?  Do you see the seeds of a later style buried in the poem?
• Consider technical questions: "Is this poem written in a form that you practice today?"  "Does the poem deploy imagery and metaphor similarly to how you use figurative language now?"  "What about verbs, nouns and adjectives--are these deployed in the poem the way you use them now?" 

Poets who have published over their lifetimes, and who get the chance to compile a "collected" or "selected" works, sometimes comment on the difficulty of going back to early work and recognizing themselves in it.  They are challenged not only by what poems to select that represent a long-gone period in their development as poets, but to explain those poems.  They often remark that they are coming at their poems as readers more than as writers, and find the experience not just challenging but refreshing, and educational.  

I hope that we at W@1 have this kind of experience this coming week!