Whose Poetry Workshop?

[bogusbrig]

I've just noticed this while, if I'm honest, I was more interested in the soccer news. It's self explanatory and some of the resulting poems are competent to good but is this away to learn poetry. It reminds me a lot of art school where you end up feeling you are making someone else art and not your own. Maybe I'm just cynical.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/poetryworkshop/

 

[treebeardgarden]

Well i might be new to this poetry lark but for me poetry is about emotion from within the author and how can you teach that.

 

[champagne1982]

Well i might be new to this poetry lark but for me poetry is about emotion from within the author and how can you teach that.

Poetry is about expressing those emotions, teachers simply attempt to instruct the willing in methods to accomplish that.

 

[jthserra]

It's self explanatory and some of the resulting poems are competent to good but is this away to learn poetry. It reminds me a lot of art school where you end up feeling you are making someone else art and not your own. Maybe I'm just cynical.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/poetryworkshop/

I don't know... I think as a tool for looking at your own work something like this is workable. It sounds similar to what we do here in the workshop section of poetry. I think the presence of a noted poet as "final judge" of it all may be a bit defeatist since once that poet speaks I think the dialogue on the poem will probably migrate to that singular opinion. But if you look at this as a tool it could be good.

jim : )

 

[eagleyez]

Poetry to me is a quest. Im a hipshooter, thus the re-hashing of my brand of questing for beauty and simple truths may not apply to alot of academic re-tooling and suggestion...that is just me.

For others, this form of critical deconstruction may come as a help.

Poems are simple prayers to me, to no particular deity or reader, and as such I find them to be like a reminder to myself, that the stringing of words is highly personal, as opposed to, say, fictive prose, with all its intertextual machinations and influence, characters and storyline.

That said, my favorite writers fill paragraphs with poetic nuance and language. Say it all, I say, say it all, truthfully.

 

[Angeline]

It can be helpful to some, but I have come to find the whole workshopping process something that slows me down more than it furthers my improvement. When I get, say, six different comments all disagreeing with each other about how my poem could be better, it mainly confuses me. Partly I think that's because in many of these venues the discussion becomes more about people competing to show how much they know about dissecting someone's writing. I don't really think that happens here much, but I seem to have reached a point where I appreciate feedback but get more from just writing and reading (other poems and criticism about poetry) and thinking about it all on my own.

 

[twelveoone]

I've just noticed this while, if I'm honest, I was more interested in the soccer news. It's self explanatory and some of the resulting poems are competent to good but is this away to learn poetry. It reminds me a lot of art school where you end up feeling you are making someone else art and not your own. Maybe I'm just cynical.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/poetryworkshop/

move up to sceptical;
after that spectral,
never ever skeletal

leave the bones behind