Category Archives: Education

In preparing for a upcoming workshop on poetic form, it occurs to me to ask (and answer) the question: why should form matter to poets in the twenty-first century? After all, the majority of poems written in English today are written in free verse. Certainly it is important to have a grasp of form in academia, if one is studying verse written before the Second World War. Most poetry written in English, from Beowulf to Wilfred Owen, employed elements of form, and could rightly be called verse. But poets nowadays write poems which often seem to have little connection to the strictures of the past.

What, then, can poets writing today, in the vers libre form that has dominated the past sixty years of poetry, gain from studying English-language forms that moved in and out of fashion over the previous thousand years?

One answer is that the poet can gain a sense of connection to poetic lineage. Discovering that poets have been re-inventing our relationship to language for thousands of years can be deliciously humbling. Perhaps this is what Emerson meant when he said that poetry must be “as new as foam, and as old as the rock.” Even more than this important universal perspective, though, I feel that I have also gained personally as a poet through studying form.
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Tactics for Sneaky Poets

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I had a great time facilitating the “Tactics for Sneaky Poets” workshop at Theater 150 this morning. The workshop is a flurry of creative exercises designed to demonstrate various “tactics” that poets can use to be “sneaky” with themselves in the creative process–to outwit the negative critic and analytical mind, and keep on keeping on in a free, creative space. While none of these ideas are are “new” in any universal sense, they are all tried-and-true techniques that have helped me along in my own creative process.

I have also been remiss in my role as a “sideshow barker” for the excellent Big Tent Poetry project. So here is a contribution to that ongoing poetic circus–a list of sneaky ways to keep the plates of poetry spinning.

Get inspired. Prime the pump before writing by reading poems you love by poets you love. Transcribe them. Memorize them. Carry them inside you.

Trigger yourself. Smells, sights, sounds, textures. Let your eyes and your mind wander. Memories, fantasies, reflections. Start anywhere. Just go.

Keep going. Try pushing past where you think the ending occurs. Write a “Part II.”

Use constraints. Use word groups, poetic forms, made-up assignments from friends. Constraints spark creative freedom.

Read and listen. Read your own work aloud, get others to read it back to you. Listen to the music. Tune it up.

Focus on language and lines. Read the poem bottom-up, focus on each line. Does it stand alone on its merits?
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Winter Poetry Workshop Series

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I will be conducting a new series of poetry workshops this winter at Theater 150. Whether you are just getting started with poetry, or trying to find space on the shelf for yet another poetry prize, you are warmly invited to come cozy up to the art of well-chosen words. Theater 150 is also offering a substantial discount if you sign up for all three classes in the series before January 8th. Class size is extremely limited, and expected to fill up fast. All proceeds once again go to benefit our beloved local theater.

Here are the dates and descriptions for each workshop:

Tactics for Sneaky Poets
Saturday, January 8th, 10am-1pm

Learn new ways to spice up your relationship to poem writing in this fun, interactive course. This class will get you writing and revising in unconventional ways, to spark new creative ideas and energize your poems. Class size is limited to a maximum of five participants to give us an opportunity to shake things up. See poetry from a new angle and take away practical tips to overcome writers’ block and invigorate your revisions.
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Why They Are Called ‘The Humanities’

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“Then what are we fighting for?”

-Attributed to Winston Churchill, in response to a suggestion that arts education be cut to fund the war effort.

There has been a furor over recent cuts in humanities education at the university level in America. Most of the counter-arguments for keeping the humanities alive play out the “transferable skills” angle. My wife, a piano teacher, knows these arguments all too well–that learning to play an instrument accelerates childhood brain development, and that music actually teaches certain kinds of mathematical reasoning (such as fractions). Likewise, with literature, English departments often underscore the importance of “soft skills” like communication.

But in the end, this line of thinking only lends strength to the argument to, for example, replace courses in Shakespeare with more practical courses in business and technical writing. It is also not difficult to imagine games designed by psychologists to more effectively deliver specific, developmental results than learning to playing Bach partitas ever will. Clearly, the argument that the humanities can deliver practical, bottom-line results is problematic. Why, then, are they so critical in difficult times?
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Poetry Workshop in Ojai

The Joy of Revision

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“Revision is not cleaning up after the party; revision is the party.”

-Source unknown

“Sometimes the best revision of a poem is a new poem.”

-Marvin Bell

Poets use words to make art. Each poem is a combination, not only of words, but of decisions made consciously and unconsciously by the poet. Revision is the process of returning to a draft to make different decisions. This process is fundamental to a poet’s development, since it not only affects the poet’s decisions in relation to the poem she is immediately revisiting, but affects her future decisions in composing and revising new poems.

The appreciation of poetry is largely a matter of taste. Therefore the idea that poetry consists of the “best words in the best order” can not be considered in the context of some universal, objective “best.” Rather, it is a personal best one is always striving toward as a poet, to bring forward what is uniquely one’s own, and therefore ultimately only the poet herself can decide what constitutes a “better” decision in relation to her poem.

And yet, paradoxically, it is through input from other self-aware readers that poets can often develop most quickly, learning through feedback how their decisions affect a receptive other. Through both giving and receiving input on poems, the poet also increasingly learns to act as this receptive other for herself in composing and writing her own poems. This is why workshop groups can provide a powerful boost to the development of any writer, and especially poets.
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What I Learned in the Pacific University MFA in Writing Program

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I have been asked to give the student speech in the upcoming MFA commencement ceremony. Needless to say, I am honored. I have been meditating on the experience of having completed this remarkable experience, now from a distance of about five months, and looking back over material from my time in the program. One piece that helps summarize some of what I learned from the MFA is the critical introduction to my graduate reading. And so, I am reprinting it here, on my site, for those who might be interested. I have enhanced the text with some hyperlinks. I gave this introduction, and then read poems from my thesis, on January 12th, 2009 at the Best Western Seaside Resort in Seaside, Oregon.

I came to my first residency, here in Seaside, Oregon, one year after the death of our infant son. That event brought me back to poetry by momentarily stripping away all other ambitions. Poetry alone got me out of bed some mornings, and helped me chart the difficult inner landscape of grief, often in the bleary pre-dawn hours before work. I sought out mentors to assist me in improving my poems, and, on the sage advice of my friend and mentor Joseph Millar, I enrolled in the low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at Pacific University.

Getting to that first residency was hard: it was the first time my wife and I had been apart since the birth and death of our son, my first time in the Northwest, and my first real writing conference. I knew no one other than Joe. But from my arrival by bus in the freezing dark, throughout the past two years, at every turn and in even the most minute details of my experience–I received confirmation, time and again, that I was in the right place.
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The Phoenix Art and Literature Contest Judge

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Logo by Alex Phelps, FTHS ’11

Today I had the pleasure of judging finalists in the poetry category of The Phoenix Art and Literature Contest. Sponsored by the Journalism Club at Foothill Technology High School, the contest received 564 entries in five categories–157 entries in poetry alone–from teenagers across Ventura County. I was truly impressed with the quality of the poems, and encouraged to see an upcoming generation of local poets exhibiting such promise and skill.

Having entered numerous contests myself, with varying degrees of acceptance and rejection, I was keenly aware of the implications of my task. There is certainly a degree of subjectivity when it comes to “ranking” art. Each poem had merit, and were I able to convey a single message to the ten finalist poets, I would want, most of all, to encourage them heartily to keep writing.

In the end, however, my job was to pare down, then rank, the poems. The task was difficult because the poems were good, because I am aware how much young people need encouragement, above all, in artistic pursuits, and because I think this contest supports such a wonderful cause. After arguing with myself, reading and re-reading the poems, and cycling through three different varieties of caffeinated drink (brewed coffee, green tea, and espresso), I made my picks. In the end, I have both a greater appreciation for the care that goes in to the judging process, and great hope for the future of poetry.

Kudos to all who entered. Winners will be announced in May.

Discovering How to Discover

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Ellen Bass gave an excellent talk today on the importance of discovery in both the creation and development of narrative poetry. She pointed out that as much as detail matters on the tactical level, strategically, it is discovery that can answer the “so what?” of a narrative poem. She offered a number of useful, practical suggestions on how to move a poem from simple recount into the realm of discovery, including:

Shift the time frame, vantage point, or speaker.
Explore the opposite of the “expected” viewpoint or tone.
Take wild associative leaps.
Link the story to other stories, or a “story behind the story.”
Ask why this is being told now; why it is necessary?

During the question and answer portion, she admitted that, in her own process, she will often not resist the temptation to become heavy-handed or draw too-neat conclusions in her poems; instead, she writes them down as a kind of platform on which to rest momentarily, knowing that in the final version the line must go. I found her candor, practicality, and commitment to craft both refreshing and inspirational.

Feedback and Revision

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“You must be careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin.”
-Stanley Kunitz

Peter Sears gave a dense and compelling talk today on the larger aim of revision–which is not only to add and subtract from a work, but to also to re-envision. Drawing on numerous specific examples from talented poets, including himself, he held up a litany of mediocre poems made great through craft–from minor tinkering to dramatic shifts in perspective and tone.

The most striking example to me was one of Peter’s own poems, which he expanded by pushing it out beyond the bounds of the natural ending of a decent poem, into far more personal territory. Then, he pared down again, and those newfound details caused the poem to fuse into something at once both more specific and universal than before. It galvanized the poem.

It occurs to me, fresh from workshop, that one of the inherent perils of taking feedback about one’s own work from a group, is that the primary instrument at the group’s disposal is subtractive. That is, they can cut–but it would be presumptuous to actually add lines to someone else’s poem. Also, as Marvin Bell points out, groups often naturally tend toward compromise, the stuff of mediocrity.

Fortunately, at the Pacific residency workshops, the faculty encourage us to look at the work more holistically, and often use certain elements of a poem to address larger themes in the group’s work, or poetry in general. In the end, it is on us authors to discover the ultimate destination behind every wild impulse that starts a poem. But having, rather than a trail guide to follow through specific terrain, instead tips from experienced travelers who have walked many trails–is what makes this process invaluable.

Emulation, Originality, and the Writing Tradition

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“A writer is a reader moved to emulation”

–Saul Bellow

I have been preparing notes for my upcoming talk on “Emulation, Originality, And The Writing Tradition” at the Ojai Center For The Arts. There is no better place than London to have spent time thinking about the English literary tradition. In this talk I intend to use concrete examples from my own relationship to the writing life, including poems and anecdotes, to show how emulation–as defined by a desire to imitate and transcend the spirit and tactical successes of works one admires–can actually enhance originality.

So many poets are concerned about losing their voice, and so many poets and non-poets hold the misbelief that art can exist in a vacuum–or that inspiration strikes best in a sealed cave, cut off from tradition. My hope is to inspire the audience into participating in the continuity of literary tradition through reading widely and responding genuinely to our rich heritage of literary arts.

Robert Peake

Postcards from London