Workshop

My feeling on workshops is that they are often more helpful than harmful. It can be really valuable to have a community of writers where you can take your poem and get reactions to it. Often ideas come up that I never would have thought of without the alchemy of the group, and, of course, it is helpful to hear what elements of the poem may not be coming across. I don’t know if this is true for anyone else, but sometimes I find myself a little too close to a poem when it is new, and showing it to others helps me distance myself from it and see it through my audience’s eyes. It is also inspiring to hear others poems and to hear of their struggles and successes. I agree with what Cliff was saying about valuing the opinions of others in the workshop, after all, we are there to help each other. In the workshops I have been in, the most successful seemed to be ones in which there was a balance between the macro (what’s at stake in the poem) and the micro (punctuation issues, etc.) as well as a balance between noting what works in a poem and what might still need developing. After all, the macro and the micro, what’s at stake and the craft, are inextricably linked together on many levels. You can’t have one without the other, though I agree that what’s at stake can often be more interesting to talk about.
Thanks,
Eve