Related to today's topic are two other posts in this blog: How to critique a poem I (3.5.19), and How to critique a poem II (8.19.19). You might also want to reread these posts as well: How to scan a line (3.15.21), What we mean when we tell you to revise this poem (10.15.21), Why a draft poem "feels right" (5.28.20), But that's what I wish my poem to mean . . . (5.30.21), What moves you most in a work of literature? (11.30.20).
We've talked about how to critique a poem, and we've talked about how to scan a line, how or when to revise a draft, but we've not talked about how to talk about a poem. In fact, it never occurred to me that we should do this, since that's what we do every week during our Wednesdays@One salon.
But it occurs to me now, especially as a follow-on to last week's aggression (well, my aggression) about critiquing poems more vigorously.
Two things that writing workshops often fall victim to are 1) cheap praise and 2) cheaper advice. Writers too often congratulate one another's work in poetry writing workshops, as if everybody has mastered the art, in every poem and in every utterance of every poem. The "thought" is "perfect," the imagery is "exactly right," the meaning is "right on," the words are "correct." Couldn't have been said differently. And none of this "criticism" means anything, by which I mean, none of it is useful to the writer or to the reader. Or, writers too often instruct a fellow writer exactly how to fix his or her poem, what line to add here, what word order to insert there, which images to create, what word to use to replace the offending word in the present draft. Again, none of this advice means a thing to either writer or reader.
We do both of these things at W@1 from time to time. We also can't explain very clearly what it is that we like or dislike about a poem or its parts. When I ask a follow up question of a vague critique, replies begin with "It's just a feeling . . ." or "I can't really explain . . ." or something like that. When I ask the writer of a poem to explain where a line comes from, how she arrived at a particular structure or syntax or word choice, what I often get in reply has everything to do with the real life event the poem is meant to capture, and nothing at all to do with the process of making the poem. Sometimes I even get a refusal to explain, as if the spirit of Blake has entered the conversation and I am murdering to dissect.
Nobody wants to be the one to say a poem's not working, not making sense (or making too much sense), and why. Conversely, and ironically, no one seems able or willing to explain why a poem IS working or making sense.
This all tells me that we are not comfortable talking about poems as works of art. We approach them (our own poems and others') too much as personal expressions, cris de coeur, and therefore off limits to critique. Everybody wants an A and everybody wants to give an A to each effort, for to do otherwise might discourage a fellow writer or, worse yet, oblige us to explain what we mean when we talk about our poem or somebody else's.
And so last week I determined to change course at W@1, to push the group back toward the art that we practice, and to our mission:
To write better poems today than I wrote yesterday, and better poems tomorrow than I am writing today.
So. Let's talk about how to talk about poems. Stay tuned for a short series of posts on ways to think and talk about poems that we can use to help each other write better.
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