the workshop as form

OK, now that Linh has embarrassed me! You sly dog.

Somewhere between Sakamaki and my locked door (keys left inside, of course), Ken asked me about the workshop. Not our workshop so much as _the_ workshop, its form, how one does it, what works and what does not.

This is a fascinating question to me because in many ways I distrust the workshop form, and in many other ways I feel I don't do it justice. So let me invite a discussion not of our workshop but of the workshop form. If you can't separate the two, don't worry about it. But try.

What do workshops help us do, and in what ways do they hinder us?
What are questions, phrases, responses, that work in a workshop (so to speak)?
Another Ken question: if we are exploring all the many things poetry can do, then aren't workshops awfully prescriptive? (my phrasing)
If we do not run workshops to prescribe but to open up the poem, then how do we do that successfully?
What is the point of talking about craft, about detail, about commas and periods, when our (ok, my) interest is in what's at stake in writing poems?
How do we balance the beginning and the end of that zoom lens?

One reason why I have all these questions is that I was trained as an academic and never went through an MFA program, hence have no experience of workshops on the graduate level. (There are goods and bads to this, I'm sure.)

I do have answers, however tentative, to all of the above, but would like to hear your discussion, too. Seems another of those issues that perhaps isn't thought enough about out loud. Like, why is it good for you to take vitamins anyway? The workshop form, in other words, is not a "natural" way to teach anything. It was invented in Iowa back when creative writing pedagogy was in its infancy. (Ah, I just naturalized that!)

Susan