more chapbooking
poetry workshop
I sense a discomfort in some of you over the finality of the chapbook. "But our styles are changing," you say, or "I want to work harder on my poems, and I don't like those I've written." So let me amend my earlier comments on your chapbooks thusly:
--If you want to write new poems, you may write up to 3. I still want 7 revised poems in the chapbook. Quite frankly, I'm less concerned with getting perfect poems than with your doing the work of revision, which is crucial to poetry writing (even for poets who are not fiendish revisers). As John Ashbery once said, he learned how to revise in his head _as_ he wrote poems. Well, in order to learn that skill, you need to know how to revise in the first place. You can only internalize what has first been external; what starts as work turns quickly into play. Or serious play.
--If you want to do a meta-chapbook, that might also work. What do I mean? If you want to take the poems you've written not as finished objects, but as material to be worked on, do so. If you want to do operations on your work, or experiments with it--transform your poems into a chapbook-length collage, that would be fine. But there does need to be purpose to your play. If you cut-out, don't cut-up, if you know what I mean. As Eve and Laura noted, flarf may sound frivolous, but's its quite political, at least in Kasey's rendering of it.
Don't worry too much that your poetry is changing, that you can't find a solid anchor, that your poetics statement now sounds quaint, if it does. The process of becoming a poet, or more accurately, of writing poems, is one that lasts longer than any semester course. The point you've arrived at when you finish your chapbook, is not the point you'll be at in 10 years. That's fine. If it were otherwise, I'd begin to worry!
I want you to leave the course with the sense that poetry is various, and that it matters.
Anyway, enjoy this last month of the semester. I know I am, despite the fatigue.
aloha, Susan
I sense a discomfort in some of you over the finality of the chapbook. "But our styles are changing," you say, or "I want to work harder on my poems, and I don't like those I've written." So let me amend my earlier comments on your chapbooks thusly:
--If you want to write new poems, you may write up to 3. I still want 7 revised poems in the chapbook. Quite frankly, I'm less concerned with getting perfect poems than with your doing the work of revision, which is crucial to poetry writing (even for poets who are not fiendish revisers). As John Ashbery once said, he learned how to revise in his head _as_ he wrote poems. Well, in order to learn that skill, you need to know how to revise in the first place. You can only internalize what has first been external; what starts as work turns quickly into play. Or serious play.
--If you want to do a meta-chapbook, that might also work. What do I mean? If you want to take the poems you've written not as finished objects, but as material to be worked on, do so. If you want to do operations on your work, or experiments with it--transform your poems into a chapbook-length collage, that would be fine. But there does need to be purpose to your play. If you cut-out, don't cut-up, if you know what I mean. As Eve and Laura noted, flarf may sound frivolous, but's its quite political, at least in Kasey's rendering of it.
Don't worry too much that your poetry is changing, that you can't find a solid anchor, that your poetics statement now sounds quaint, if it does. The process of becoming a poet, or more accurately, of writing poems, is one that lasts longer than any semester course. The point you've arrived at when you finish your chapbook, is not the point you'll be at in 10 years. That's fine. If it were otherwise, I'd begin to worry!
I want you to leave the course with the sense that poetry is various, and that it matters.
Anyway, enjoy this last month of the semester. I know I am, despite the fatigue.
aloha, Susan
posted by susan at 11:40 AM
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