How much work could a workshop, shop?

How much work could a workshop shop?

It occurs to me nearly a week into this guest blogging gig that I’ve done nothing to introduce myself.  Maybe the obvious – I’m a poet with Red Hen Press   – was always apparent, maybe not.  I now teach creative writing and literature classes at the University of Louisville after having been on the faculty at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon for ten years.  I also write fiction and do a lot of book reviewing, and my next project with Red Hen is an anthology and introductory poetry-writing textbook, all in one.

But what does this have to do with the title of this blog, though? (Even if learning more about me is actually the whole purpose of the blog and why I’ve delayed so long in sharing that seems weird.)

I began by indulging this impulse to introduce oneself, to self-identify, to explain, apologize and make excuses because I think that’s the primary and motivating force behind the workshop setting in the introductory class.  I think the reason the workshop in the intro class becomes so high stakes (and thus keeps the conversation from becoming as productive as it could be) is that, perhaps more than any other academic experience, it is the individual self that is on display and under scrutiny.  And though a major goal, ultimately, of the workshop and considerations of revisions generally is to begin to separate the originating self that produced the poem from the public artifact of the poem, in the introductory class students are not yet ready to make that separation.

And that’s why in my introduction to creative writing class when it’s your turn to be “workshopped” (ack. is that a word?) you get to talk.  Not a ton, but some.  And, you actually get to talk first.

On the point of talking first, students don’t get to backstory and explain the whole poem (the way, for instance, we all do when we present a poem at a reading, thereby corralling the appropriate emotions in our audience), but I do ask them two things. First, I will have selected one of the five poems they’ve turned in with their “packet” of poems for the poetry unit (I should make clear here that much of what I’ve said in the posts this week refers to my experience teaching a three-genre, introductory class). Then I ask them to select an additional poem of their choice for consideration. I like the buy in this gives them to the process.

Second, I ask them, prior to discussion, if there are corrections or a minor revision they need to point out.  I was stunned to find out, for instance, that at one point the main reason students often capitalized the first line of their poems was because they didn’t know how to turn “auto correct” off  Word. This bit takes care of any irrelevant comments about surface errors introductory student responders are likely to make and which are — in the introductory setting — beside the point generally.  Further, if during the course of the workshop if the class clearly “stuck” on some point of information, I will ask the poet to clear it up for us.  It might be small – such as a historical or geographic reference of some sort in a poem that is critical (and, thus a great teaching opportunity for using epigraphs) – or large, for instance: are you talking about your girlfriend or your mother in this poem? 

In any case, I believe that the point a workshop must make about the poem being able to stand on its own is made very clearly by the conversation that precedes the poet’s explanation, and almost always it is a relief for everyone to clear up the confusion. The workshop then unfolds much more productively.

The hazard to this method (with which some of you will not doubt disagree) is that some students will volunteer too much information; will offer immediate responses even when a responder is following a line of critique that is informed and appropriate; or will even correct responders unprompted – all of which can shut down conversation.  Fortunately, the naturally chatty students are also the ones most amenable to being prompted to please hold comments until asked.

In my experience, this opportunity to explain and identify intentions helps tremendously with the primary anxiety and obstacle in the beginning workshop: students’ inability to separate the poem (faulty, broken, insufficient – as writing always is) from their own identity, which they largely perceive as whole.

I am certain, though, that there are differences of opinion about how to make a workshop, work; when students should talk and when they should not.  Any apologists for the silent approach? You’re free to speak.

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How much work could a workshop, shop?

It occurs to me nearly a week into this guest blogging gig that I’ve done nothing to introduce myself.  Maybe the obvious – I’m a poet with Red Hen Press   – was always apparent, maybe not.  I now teach creative writing and literature classes at the University of Louisville after having been on the faculty at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon for ten years.  I also write fiction and do a lot of book reviewing, and my next project with Red Hen is an anthology and introductory poetry-writing textbook, all in one.

But what does this have to do with the title of this blog, though? (Even if learning more about me is actually the whole purpose of the blog and why I’ve delayed so long in sharing that seems weird.)

I began by indulging this impulse to introduce oneself, to self-identify, to explain, apologize and make excuses because I think that’s the primary and motivating force behind the workshop setting in the introductory class.  I think the reason the workshop in the intro class becomes so high stakes (and thus keeps the conversation from becoming as productive as it could be) is that, perhaps more than any other academic experience, it is the individual self that is on display and under scrutiny.  And though a major goal, ultimately, of the workshop and considerations of revisions generally is to begin to separate the originating self that produced the poem from the public artifact of the poem, in the introductory class students are not yet ready to make that separation.

And that’s why in my introduction to creative writing class when it’s your turn to be “workshopped” (ack. is that a word?) you get to talk.  Not a ton, but some.  And, you actually get to talk first.

On the point of talking first, students don’t get to backstory and explain the whole poem (the way, for instance, we all do when we present a poem at a reading, thereby corralling the appropriate emotions in our audience), but I do ask them two things. First, I will have selected one of the five poems they’ve turned in with their “packet” of poems for the poetry unit (I should make clear here that much of what I’ve said in the posts this week refers to my experience teaching a three-genre, introductory class). Then I ask them to select an additional poem of their choice for consideration. I like the buy in this gives them to the process.

Second, I ask them, prior to discussion, if there are corrections or a minor revision they need to point out.  I was stunned to find out, for instance, that at one point the main reason students often capitalized the first line of their poems was because they didn’t know how to turn “auto correct” off  Word. This bit takes care of any irrelevant comments about surface errors introductory student responders are likely to make and which are — in the introductory setting — beside the point generally.  Further, if during the course of the workshop if the class clearly “stuck” on some point of information, I will ask the poet to clear it up for us.  It might be small – such as a historical or geographic reference of some sort in a poem that is critical (and, thus a great teaching opportunity for using epigraphs) – or large, for instance: are you talking about your girlfriend or your mother in this poem? 

In any case, I believe that the point a workshop must make about the poem being able to stand on its own is made very clearly by the conversation that precedes the poet’s explanation, and almost always it is a relief for everyone to clear up the confusion. The workshop then unfolds much more productively.

The hazard to this method (with which some of you will not doubt disagree) is that some students will volunteer too much information; will offer immediate responses even when a responder is following a line of critique that is informed and appropriate; or will even correct responders unprompted – all of which can shut down conversation.  Fortunately, the naturally chatty students are also the ones most amenable to being prompted to please hold comments until asked.

In my experience, this opportunity to explain and identify intentions helps tremendously with the primary anxiety and obstacle in the beginning workshop: students’ inability to separate the poem (faulty, broken, insufficient – as writing always is) from their own identity, which they largely perceive as whole.

I am certain, though, that there are differences of opinion about how to make a workshop, work; when students should talk and when they should not.  Any apologists for the silent approach? You’re free to speak.

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Recipes & Reading Lists: Separated at Birth?

Winter in Des Moines is never easy, nothing like the gentle weather of Red Hen’s L.A. home, but this one has been a bear.   The blizzards have made headlines.  Now here we are at Valentine’s Day, and the snow that fell before Christmas remains on the ground.  We’re crushed under chilly white sediment.

What’s a guy to do?   Certainly I’ve got a desk heaped with projects.  This bleak midwinter saw me complete the edits for my forthcoming Red Hen title, The Sea-God’s Herb: Selected Work on the Postmodern Project.  Also I’ve got the usual stacks of grading.   Yeah yeah yeah — enough about work, already.  The real relief comes in the kitchen.  My wife and I know how to celebrate a Hallmark holiday, and lighten the winter gloom, pulling together a great meal.

For my final blog, I’ll talk recipes, not reading lists.  I’ll share, for starters, the mouth-watering possibilities in rare meat called guanciale.  A pungent near-bacon made from the cheek of the pig, fresh local guanciale can be found in just two places on earth: in around Rome, and in and around Des Moines.  La Quercia Meats of Iowa delivers unusual pork products (prosciutto would be another) so flavorful and traditional that they’ve won raves in the New York Times.

The dish that features guanciale is a hearty thing, with red sauce, red pepper, and onions.  What, no garlic?  Not if you ask the Romans, who make the meal a regular part of their menu from November through April.  This is America, though, and in my kitchen I draw up the ingredients.  I’ve got garlic cooking in the exceptional fat of the guanciale, and garlic amid the nuggets of the meat in the finished product.   That’s bucatini all’Amatriciana, and you’ll find it in many a foodie’s diary.   To prepare it well requires a skilled hand, and this winter I finally developed one.

But, look at that: talking about diaries, revisions, and skilled hand.  You’d think I was still talking about writing.  The very name of the dish takes us to the library, looking up bucatini (tubular pasta, its opening a hole or buca) and Amatriciana (in the hill-town of Amatrice, farmers and shepherds needed a bracing repast after their long, cold days in the fields).  Then there’s the whole problem of describing the dish, trying to generate anticipation as well as get across its unique qualities.  In my kitchen, anyway, I’m always a short step from my desk and its papers.

The poetry on Red Hen Press shares my sensibility.  The books could be culled for an anthology of fine food reconfigured as lines on a page.  Indeed, wasn’t the 2002 Saltman Award-winner State of Blessed Gluttony, by Susan Thomas?  The book’s link is below.  Thomas’s witty “Note” imagines the farewell letter left by Penelope of the The Odyssey, grown weary of waiting for Ulysses.  Where better for such a poem to start than letting the man know what the palace has got for oil, mutton, and wine?

Even the experimental poetry of Kimberly Burwick, in Has No Kinsmen, includes a scary meditation on preparing salad.   And Nickole Brown’s Sister samples classic Southern fare, and Camille Dungy makes significant menu distinctions:  What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison.   Really, the examples could go on a lot longer.   But I think you see the point: that poetry amounts to cold-weather sustenance as good as anything in a dish.  Besides, I’ve got lunch waiting.

http://www.redhen.org/RedHenPress.html#/catalog/catalogView/type=authors;authorUUID=02B398FC-0A4B-66F4-906C-89DB4A85D967

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The Writer’s Mail

Creative Writing, sure, I teach it.  Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction, Poetry: I’ve headed up rewarding workshops in them all.  Naturally, too, I’ve heard the objections.   The argument goes this way: to teach writing interferes with genuine creation and natural growth.  A workshop sets up fake parameters for success and failure, prizing a limited classroom response over an earned readership by real people.

It’s a misanthropic tune, really — I mean, the complaints about Creative Writing warn people against working with others interested in the same thing.  Nuthouse.  But while I can’t buy the argument, I can borrow a bit of it to liven up my own workshops.  Ten or twelve years ago, I began to incorporate a small helping of the real world in my classes.  I began to come in, every now and again, with what I called “The Writer’s Mail.”

Writers generate print, right?  A lot of print.  So by logical extension, if our efforts make any headway at all, we’re bound to get a lot of mail.  John Updike, in a review, called it “lively, burdensome mail.” Not bad, for a thumbnail.   And the fact that the mail’s often electronic, these days, doesn’t change things.  Still lively, still burdensome, much of it demands to be printed out and mulled over.   More than a few of the pieces I’ve selected to bring into class have been electronic printouts.

Thus my students get a sense of success and failure beyond their weekly meetings.  They hear it thumping through the slot in the door and beeping into the Inbox.   Have I shared rejections?  Sure, if the editor’s response is in some way informative.  In the same way, I’ve shared unusual perspectives, illuminating perspectives, for instance from a reviewer over in Italy (my Earthquake I.D., originally on Red Hen, is now out in translation).  I’ve shown the students a magazine contract, a set of galleys, a request for an anthology contribution.  Also they learn about contributions of the other kind: pleas for financial aid, from literary non-profits.

The Writers’ Mail is all that and more — but its primary element, to be sure, is other books and publications.  When I first received The Believer out of New York, and L.A. Review from the other coast, I showed those to my apprentices.  Many a time, too, I’ve come to class with some Advance Readers Copy, some book that seemed worth calling attention too.   Today, in fact, brought me another of those.

If I wanted to, I could tack a dozen links onto the end of this blog, highlighting  a dozen significant new titles.  But I know better than to weigh a blog down with so long a tail.   Rather, I’ll mention just one, the sort of university-press publication you’d have trouble finding in Barnes & Noble.  That would be Joe Amato’s Once an Engineer.  A genre-bending but nerve-jolting memoir, with central figures dimly Italian and thoroughly no-account in icebound upstate New York, the book’s a heady and moving accomplishment, tickling a largely unseen corner of working America to life.  Once an Engineer has brought on long thoughts and abiding pleasure, and it reached me unbidden, thanks to The Writer’s Mail.

http://www.sunypress.edu/p-4859-once-an-engineer.aspx

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The Wound of Poetry

Hello again! 

And apologies for not properly introducing myself in the first post …my name is Adrianne Kalfopoulou, and I’ve had the huge privilege of having a second book of poems, Passion Maps, published by Red Hen last November. I was thinking about the “why that title” question when someone asked me, “Is the maps in the title a verb or a noun?” And I realized it’s both, as passion maps us, and also those mappings become their own cartographies. This brings me to the wonderful Greek poet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (whose selected poems, The Scattered Papers of Penelope edited by Karen Van Dyck, was recently published by Graywolf)  — .  I’ve been thinking a lot about Katerina in relation to this whole idea of passion, or pathos (the Greek word) more suggestive of suffering (as in the passion of Christ) than any sort of happy orgasmic moment…

Last Wednesday I went to a reading of Katerina’s in Plaka, the old part of Athens just under the Acropolis, where she read her poem “The Scar” that begins: “Instead of a star, a scar shone over my birth./” I should give some background on the story Katerina famously tells of how she was born healthy only to catch a near-fatal virus at 6 months that would have been cured with penicillin. “My mother had me much older than most women in those days, at 45…if only she’d waited another year”. She speaks of the fever and swelling that left her one leg and arm misshapen, the wound that would have her forever walk with a limp. But quickly adds that none of it stopped her from living a full life of poetry and erotas. “I paid my ticket” she says, “My Iphigenia refused to sacrifice herself.” In Greece, for Greeks, this is a familiar idea, that of mira (destiny or fate), received in whatever shapes it happens to come in: “On my first journey by the stream of death” the poem continues, “who knows what exchanges were made that night,/what I gave and what I took, what I renounced,/what I promised so life would keep me in its service?/ Was it blackmail, agreement or threat?/Should I be grateful for the butchered gift of existence/or vengeful?…Later in the evening she tells the audience, “I am blessed for all that I lack, it has taught me about what I really need.”

What do we really need? What a question! (the Rolling Stones of course tell us we always get what we need) — but poems seem to present themselves in those moments, when the anguish of the really takes over; Katerina says when she writes a poem what was a wound then becomes a scar. I’d like to suggest an exercise: to find a very concrete metaphor for a scar/wound that made possible something we would not have experienced, recognized, or possessed without it. Katerina has several, besides “the Scar”; there’s also “The Ladder” that begins: “My body is a little ladder that I lean against the wall of the world.”

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Elsewhere in Greece

Greetings all the way from Greece!

I’m excited to be here blogging for the fabulous hens, and thinking of everyone in – wow, California!  I live in Athens and spend a lot of time imagining people and places at far distances. It seems to be what I’ve spent a lot of my life doing.  When my first book of poems came out I remember a line in one of the emails from Mark asking, “What time is it over there?” in that 10 –12 hr. difference between the West coast & Greece. I love the vertigo & giddiness of inhabiting unknown and imagined geographies, which is a lot like the feeling I get starting a new poem, or story. Last Friday I took my daughter to the airport where she was getting on the plane back to school in New York, and I had that same feeling, laced too with the bitter-sweetness of her departure. On the way home, thinking about getting used to the quiet of the apartment again I tried to predict the uninterrupted work I could do (no  last minute supermarket runs!), but also knew having her so far meant I would be spending a lot of time “there”, calculating the time difference, listening to her describe the snow-covered streets while I would be staring at the mid-winter Almond blossoms… this in-between-worlds sense so much like the experience of writing, of being in a limbo of not-quite-there-or-here that keeps you forever elsewhere.

I had a wonderful poetry teacher in college, the poet Michael Harper, and I remember him talking once about the vocational hazards of the poet; ‘elsewhere-ness’ was a big one (& living in Greece only compounds this) – you forget your keys, you misplace important financial statements, you leave your card in the ATM, but you notice things, and keep making poems & stories out of them, like what I saw coming home from the airport as I drove up the one way street in my neighborhood; a police car ahead of me stopped a motorcyclist coming down in the opposite (wrong) direction. We all waited patiently as a discussion took place and the guy on the motorbike by turns nodded and shook his head, and then (amazingly) laughed, waved to the policeman still in his car, and continued down the street in the opposite direction. I love these moments of converging perspectives and surprise, this vertigo that has me thinking so often “if this happened somewhere else…” which, yes, has me Carry(ing) On!

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on the desk (or, books DO matter)

Trapped in my office, surrounded by books, papers, and other sundries, I realize I have a bunch of pretty cool poetry collections lying around here. I’ll list them quickly here, in no particular order without annotations (or links: look ‘em up yourself!), saying only that if I put it here, I recommend it.

Sharon Dolin, Burn and Dodge

Scott Hightower, Natural Trouble

Kathy Fagan, The Charm

Terri Witek, Shipwreck Dress

Sandra Simonds, Warsaw Bikini

Rachel Hadas, River of Forgetfulness

Jane Satterfield, Assignation at Vanishing Point

Brendan Constantine, Letters to Guns (yes, Red Hen’s own)

Molly Peacock, Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems

Jean Gallagher, This Minute

Billy Collins, Picnic, Lightning

Jeff Gundy, Deer Flies

Don Bogen, Luster

Basil Bunting, Complete Poems

Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems

David Lehman, ed. Great American Prose Poems

The One O’clock Poets, This Full Green Hour (shameless plug: this is my poetry group, and we’re reading Thursday, 1/21/10, 6pm at Cornelia Street Cafe)

Colette Inez, Eight Minutes from the Sun

….and I’ll close the list with my current favorite book about writing poems:

Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

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writing prompt!

I don’t know about you, but I love being given assignments–it really helps get me into gear, even when I feel uninspired. So if you’re in need of inspiration, here’s your assignment for the day:
A “Don’t Give up” Poem
Write a series of lines (of any length or style), each of which begins with the words “Don’t give up…” There are endless possibilities–you could list things (or activities) not to give up, or reasons not to give up (“Don’t give up because…”, or conditions (“Don’t give up if…” or “…unless…”), or even directly address particular people (“Don’t give up, Amelia Earhart…”).  Make up your own additional rules, if you like.

Try it and see what happens. Post the results as a comment here, if you like! Have fun!

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