Photo by Sylvain Pedneault

I was born and raised in a town that recently ranked as the worst place in the nation to live, due to unemployment. My father relocated to the Imperial Valley of California before I was born. He went there to run experimental community-oriented education programs in a school for troubled teens located three blocks north of the U.S.-Mexico border. In the second week of his tenure, students burned the school to the ground.

He went on to receive one of California’s highest awards for education, as well as to testify at trials for drive-by shootings. In the end, his approach to education succeeded in changing the lives of many troubled and disadvantaged students. Conventional schools had given up on them. His new approach succeeded with two key elements: a community of support, and an emphasis on practical skills. He is still remembered fondly as an agent of positive change.

Coming from this background, I adopted the idea that all education is ultimately self-education; that it is my responsibility to seek out books, people, institutions, and other resources to learn what I need, when I need it, on a practical basis. This is part of why, despite a lifelong love of computer programming, I left the computer engineering department at a top school after the first year.

I stayed on as an employee of the university’s innovative self-paced computer science program, learning and teaching languages to other undergraduates. Rather than listen to professors read from texts at set times in lectures, I knew I could find and read the same texts for myself–exactly when I needed to do so to solve a real-world problem. Rather than tackle theoretical assignments in labs, I decided to take on my own programming projects with concrete results.

As Sir Ken Robinson points out in his TED talk, there is an entire generation coming up behind me with similar ideas about education. Having grown up with the power of unbundled, just-in-time content on the internet, they seek the same qualities in an educational model, and find the existing paradigm stifling. Yet also, far from wanting to just sequester themselves away in a dark room with a book, they organize real-time communities around interests as unique as they are.

The key elements that galvanized “at risk” teenagers toward positive change in my father’s school are the same ingredients that an entire generation now craves. This generation is equally “at risk”–of taking up a variation on the ’60s slogan encouraging them to “turn on [the iPhone], tune in [to Facebook], drop out [of lectures].” The time has come for specific, practical, just-in-time education, organized around virtual social communities, to optimize how an entire upcoming generation of self-teachers will learn. And this would seem to put traditional institutions of learning “at risk” of being consumed in a conflagration of radical change.

Yet it is the institutions, and not the teachers, under threat. The experiences I had as an undergraduate in the English department, by contrast with the conveyor-belt approach to teaching engineering, involved meaningful connections with brilliant professors, the likes of which I could not have experienced anywhere else. Surely, though, professors like Stephen Booth or Robert Hass would be just as inspiring to engage with virtually, as I did later with mentors in my graduate creative writing program.

People are priceless. A good teacher can change your life like no one else. Imagine the power they will have to transform lives–especially in under-served communities–once we finally begin to tap the full educational potential of the digital age. Now that is a fire worth starting.

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.

One gain for me was the discovery, through practicing various forms, that constraint galvanizes creativity. In fact, I would say that I found a kind of freedom within constriction. By practicing various forms, I have learned that many types of constraints–such as meter, rhyme scheme, or even just a list of words to use when writing a poem–intensify my relationship to the “assignment” at hand. My creativity rises to the challenge, and I find myself writing more interesting lines than if simply given a blank page and a pat on the back. Exercises in form have helped me build creative muscle. It is a bit like running with weights. And as an added benefit, sometimes the formal poem succeeds as well.

Another wonderful aspect of studying form is being influenced by the musical heritage of poetry. I studied sonnets extensively as an undergraduate, writing essays on Dante, Petrarch, and Sydney, as well as the occasional sonnet to my girlfriend at the time. When I became more serious about writing poetry, I thought I had to somehow make a clean break from verse, and learn to write free verse as though I were starting from scratch. What I found, over time, and through working with astute mentors, is that the thousands of sonnets I had ingested in my teens became a tremendous asset. Musicality wins in poetry, above any other element (imagery, ideas, you-name-it). The music of natural English speech is closely allied to iambic and trochaic patterns. And so, once I embraced it, I found sonnet-like music suffusing my free-verse poems quite naturally and effectively.

Finally, there is a gain in studying form that brings together the aspects of lineage, creativity in constraint, and poetry’s musical heritage. By dancing between free-verse and formal poetry, I feel not only connected to poetry’s lineage in the abstract, but more able to synthesize old and new in my own work. This is the paradox of poetry–that it is a long-standing tradition of breaking with tradition. I have found that those poets who seem most unique, and whom history often celebrates as the vanguard of some new movement, were steeped in understanding of their fore-bearers–not as an abstract appreciation, but through the practical application of exercises, studies, and experiments with form.

Since free verse means the poet must invent and reinvent the form as she goes, understanding and practicing elements of form are, more than ever, a key part of a poet’s development. It is important, though, for writers to study form from a writers’ perspective–with an eye toward practical application. The intricacies of form can be seductive, since the analytical interrelations have themselves an aesthetic appeal. But it is important to ask: how is this making my poetry better? How is this increasing the musicality, and creative zeal, of the poems I write? This is a key to reaping what studies in form can offer: a greater sense of place in the timeless lineage, an explosion of creative freedom caused by seeming constriction, an attunement of the poet’s musical ear, an the ability to synthesize tradition and innovation in the centuries-old pursuit of using words to get beyond words.

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?

Play. Cut poems up. Scribble and doodle. Swap lines around, swap stanzas around. Make up zany titles. Play!

Break the rules. Be prepared to break the rules to make the poem better. Constraints are there to get you free. It’s the freedom, and the poem, that counts.

Write bad. Try to write a “bad” poem. It gets you wild and free. Sometimes the harder you try to be bad, the better it gets.

Imitate. Write in the style of a favorite poet (or even one who simply provokes you.) You’ll be imitating your perceptions of them, which are original and entirely your own.

There’s more. Take the attitude that “There’s more where that came from.” If you do, you’ll be right.

Write briefly and often. Robert Hass said, “You can do your life’s work in forty minutes per day.” Write often enough to stay “in the game,” usually several times per week. Set a time limit. You can go over if needed.

Anywhere, anytime. Write when you don’t feel like it. Write when uninspired. Interesting language makes for better poetry than lofty, preconceived ideas. Trigger yourself, set a time limit, and just go. You’ll surprise yourself.

Keep a scroll. In addition to keeping going on a poem, try keeping one big document of poems and poem-snippets, so you’re never at the beginning, just in the flow. Pick up wherever you last left off, write in the date, and just go.

Swap assignments. Make up assignments (constraints) and swap them with friends. Do them all together in small groups, in person or over email. Do it regularly (e.g. once per month.) Then share the results. Learn from each other. Encourage each other. Keep each other free.

Flow. Marvin Bell said, “The good stuff and the bad stuff is all part of the stuff.” Keep flowing with it. Sometimes you’re just “clearing your throat.” Remember to let yourself “write bad,” and that the “bad” can sometimes transform into something great.

Stay in the game. Writing, reading, attending workshops, reading aloud in various venues (including among family and friends), reviewing books, swapping favorites on email–it all counts. But the best way to learn writing is by writing. Keep marking up the page. Keep clacking away at the keys. Every little bit counts, even if there seems to be no “result” that day. Stay nimble. Stay receptive. Stay in the game.

How else do you keep yourself motivated, creative, and free as a writer?

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.

More Joy of Revision in Poetry
Saturday, January 29th, 10am-1pm

Bring a poem of your own to this interactive poetry workshop. Learn how to give and receive feedback in a supportive environment. Discover how to “calibrate” your perceptions and intentions as a writer through input from intelligent, engaged peers. Explore matters of form and narrative, meaning and mood in your own work along with a select group of fellow writers. Class size is limited to a maximum of five participants to give us an opportunity to dig deep, not only into the poems of the day, but the writing process in general. Come away not only with insights into your own poem, but into the greater conversation of poetry.

Exploring Form in Poetry
Saturday, February 19th, 10am-1pm

You don’t have to know your sestinas from your villanelles to learn how timeless poetic forms can make your poems sing. Class size is limited to a maximum of five participants to give us an opportunity to explore a range of forms through practical exercises and discussion.  Learn about forms by practicing several, and come away with a quiver full of new ideas, and a new appreciation for the centuries-old tradition of form in poetry.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions. Here’s to a season of warmth and poetry!

“Then what are we fighting for?”

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?

When I transferred out of the computer engineering department at a top university during the height of the dot-com era to study poetry instead, many thought I was crazy. Several years later, after the death of our infant son, poetry became the only language that made sense. It kept me sane when nothing seemed sane anymore. I credit my being here to write this now in large part to all the Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton I read back then–which opened the door to Seamus Heaney, Robert Hass, and Li-Young Lee. I found a means to embrace some of the greatest paradoxes of living, and transcend human suffering, through their words.

It is the centuries-old tradition of humanities education that passes down the words of Socrates to us, that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Humanities examine what it means to be alive, and human. And now more than ever, after market crashes, environmental disasters, and seemingly endless and intractable wars, we must ask ourselves: do we really have an excess of humanity? Is our ability to embrace the complexity of living with dignity and compassion at such a surplus nowadays that it should be the first thing to go?

Any text can teach you to read, and any topic can teach you to write. Only literature can teach you why to read, and why to write. Science can measure how well you hear and see. But visual and performing arts teach us why these senses matter. Do not support the humanities because they will give you the means to an easier life. Support them because they will quite simply make life worth living, no matter how difficult it gets.

Do not sign your child up for piano lessons because you want to give them an edge over other kids. Do it because they may wake up one day somewhere in suburbia, surrounded by all the symbols of material prosperity, with a deep and gnawing hollowness that negates every grade or promotion they ever won. And if, in that moment, a bar of Bach or a line from Shakespeare returns to them, they might just have a reason to go on being human, and alive.

Safety glasses optional

I am looking forward to conducting a poetry workshop on Saturday, October 9th from 10am-12:30pm at Theater 150 in Ojai.

Bring a poem of your own to discover The Joy of Revision. Learn how to give and receive feedback in an interactive and supportive environment. Discover how to “calibrate” your perceptions and intentions as a writer through input from intelligent, engaged peers. Explore matters of form and narrative, meaning and mood in your own work along with a select group of fellow writers.

Class size is limited to a maximum of five or six participants to give us an opportunity to dig deep, not only into the poems of the day, but the writing process in general. Come away with insights into your own work, as well as into the greater conversation of poetry.

For more information and to reserve your space, please contact me directly. The workshop is reasonably priced, and all proceeds benefit Theater 150.

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

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

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.

Yet, due to the subjective nature of poetry, and the inevitable realities of interpersonal dynamics, workshop groups can tend toward consensus, which favors the safety of the known, and therefore tends toward mediocrity. However, by focusing on the poet’s specific decisions, and the effect of those decisions upon a receptive, intelligent reader, the poet can be given useful feedback. This feedback is not so much on what a reader may or may not have liked, but is instead about what is and is not working in relation to the poet’s intent–or, at least, what the poet themselves likely experienced when they first re-read their own poem. It thereby becomes a process of aesthetic calibration, comparing one’s own experience and intent to the experience of respected peers.

The following set of questions, arranged in three categories, can be used by groups or individuals to generate input on a poem. They are best used in order.

The first question deals with an aspect of poetry sometimes ignored in contemporary workshop groups–the form, or lack of form, that a poet has decided to adopt in writing the poem. The second and third questions deal with content and mood, respectively. Billy Collins is supposed to have said that the problem with beginning poets is that they are “clear when they should be mysterious, and mysterious when they should be clear.” Differentiating feedback about “what happens” in contrast to “what is evoked” by a poem can help the poet to understand the extent to which they are communicating effectively in these two distinct aspects of writing.

1. What is the form?

Does the poem employ meter? Syllable count? Does the poem employ a rhyme scheme? What about internal rhyme? Is the poem in stanzas? How many? Are they composed of equal-length lines? Are the lines of roughly the same length? Are they long or short? Does the poem use traditional syntax and grammar? Does the poem employ the sentence as a unit of thought? If so, are lines enjambed? Are the first words of each line capitalized?

2. What happens in the poem?

Is there a narrative in the poem? If so, what seems to be happening? Can you summarize the events of the poem?

Even if the poem does not seem to have any narrative (and especially if it does): who is speaking? Is there more than one speaker? What are they speaking about? To whom?

3. What is evoked by the poem?

What is the tone of the speaker? Does the tone change?

What else is hinted at, but not declared, by this poem?

What is the mood? How do you feel when reading it? Does this feeling change?

As you can see, these questions are suitable to engage even elementary readers in some form of discussion. It avoids the unhelpful and sometimes conversation-stopping question “What is this poem about?” entirely, focusing instead on form, events, and mood. If some terms are unfamiliar, this provides a good opportunity for a workshop leader to introduce literary concepts.

These same questions can also provide structural guidance to advanced individuals or workshop groups, reminding them of some subtle distinctions in the art of giving and receiving helpful feedback (including to oneself.) Ultimately, the ability to give and receive feedback well lends itself to an improved ability to revise one’s work, which in turn leads to the ability to craft more compelling and meaningful poems. Hopefully, asking these questions can help you to take a few more steps along that path.

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.

After two years, it seems to me that poetry is not, in fact, a skill one learns or teaches–like driving or typing–but actually a virus one catches from sustained and intimate contact with the infected. Having been cooped up with so many brilliant invalids–both faculty and students, poets and prose writers–over the last two years, I can definitely say I came down with something. More than anything, I learned how to give over to this healing sickness–by learning to let my poems have their own say.

In a letter to his brothers, John Keats wrote:

…at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously–I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

Above all, it is this ability Keats describes as “negative capability” that I cultivated, with great help, during my study here.

I cultivated this ability on two fronts: in the context of an individual poem, following the “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” more closely and more confidently, striking out boldly from line to line, assured that either my subconscious would catch me–or else the resulting fall and splatter would be spectacular. I also cultivated negative capability in the larger context of my writing as a whole, resisting “irritable reaching after fact & reason” and instead writing, and writing, and writing some more as an exercise in creative freedom, receptivity, and knowing myself.

For me, one of the great, unexpected aides in cultivating negative capability was poetic form. Whether the simple challenge to maintain stanzaic integrity, or the complex machinations of a sestina or villanelle, self-imposed limitations actually seemed to elicit greater wildness and surprise–to let my poems have more of their own say through me, instead of the other way around. It seems as though form distracts a certain logical part of my mind long enough to let the other, more creative parts come into play. And yet, when I came in to this program, I was unsure about the place of formal elements in contemporary writing in general, and my own writing in particular.

You see, I came in to this program as my own little house divided: between undergraduate studies filled with formal poems and critical theory, and a writing life fascinated by the wildness and apparently simplicity of most free-verse contemporary poems. In my third semester, the essay semester, I returned to an old favorite poet, Seamus Heaney, for help in understanding how to synthesize wildness and precision, scholarship and artistry, innovation and tradition–and in doing so, discovered a relationship between form and freedom. Studying Heaney’s poems and essays helped me understand how wild imagination and well-tuned music can fuse to create what he called “total adequacy,” that is, “a ring of truth within the medium itself.”

The title poem of my thesis, “The Silence Teacher“–which you will hear in a moment–is one example of how form and Negative Capability eventually came together, and taught me a lot in the process about how to let a poem have its own say. Based on the experience of visiting one of my wife’s oldest friends in England after the death of our son, early drafts were loaded, not only with personal feeling, but a disjointed amalgam of experiences and thoughts. We visited John Keats’ house in Hampstead during that trip, and I read poems by Robert Hass on rainy days. In this literarily-intoxicated state, the seemingly lighthearted story of the woman’s deaf daughter mistakenly calling her mother a “silence teacher” struck me as profound.

“Silence” became a lens through which I could view the present-tense experience of grieving amidst polite conversation, as well as the actual moment of loss, which remains present with me to this day. But, as much as this lens of silence provided its own kind of clarity and adequacy inside of me, coordinating and communicating these elements such that they might have a similar impact on a reader led me through draft after draft, and form after form.

Sandra Alcosser sent me countless examples of fine lyric poems, placing me in the middle of the choir to help me discover my own voice. Re-reading Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island,” as well as David St. John‘s “To Pasolini,” gave me a renewed understanding of the possibilities of the terza rima form. What I discovered in this process is the extent to which musicality and form heightened, elevated, and actually advanced my presentation of events and ideas: the better the music, the more these disjointed events seemed to come together and make “sense”–that is, to convey “a ring of truth.” The more this happened, the more I was encouraged to refine the imagery and word choice. Extensive feedback from my advisors and workshop groups helped validate these revisions, but it was the poem itself that ultimately spurred me on–teaching me, in its own way, how to clarify the narrative facts, remain wild and encompassing in my imagination of the experience, and, above all–stay true to the music.

Grief itself eventually became its own kind of reason, leading to its own conclusions. And so, particularly in my second year, the challenge became to remain open to a wider range of human experience. During one lecture, Marvin Bell admonished that we should write, instead of so many elegies to the dead, more love poems to the living. I took this advice to heart, and, with Marvin’s encouragement, began leaping off whatever ledge I encountered next–writing poems about love, several about our cat, and even one inspired by a sign on public bus.

In this way, I began to discover myself a writer in the way William Stafford understood, when he said, “A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.” And so, my creative process became largely a matter of starting–up early before work, up late when I should have been in bed, or on the weekends in our local coffee shop. I became–not a grief poet, or a lighthearted poet, a formal poet, or a free-verse poet–but a receptive poet, and a determined sitter before the laptop screen.

Assembling two years of work into a creative manuscript was equally a process of alchemy, gut, and nerve. In the end, I produced a collection of poems on a wide range of topics, grief being one of them. Yet, like Antonio Machado’s thorn in the heart, grief informed my writing process, no matter the subject, and, above all, kept reminding me, poignantly, of that heart.

More challenging for me than picking out poems, grouping them, or assembling them in a sequence was the weighty sense of finality that came with that little black buckram-bound book we call the thesis. For a moment, it symbolized “the end.” And then, once again, as an act of sheer defiance, I fired up the word processor, opened my running document full of rough drafts, false starts, cheesy ideas, and occasional gems, and just wrote something. Probably something bad–or worse, “just alright.” But in that moment, poetry was, once again, revitalized in my life.

More important, then, than the product of my two years here at Pacific–this thesis–has been the process of developing a practice of writing which includes actively cultivating “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts”–both within the poems, and within the larger process of writing–finding along the way that each poem had something to teach me, and something to say.

This has been the greatest gift of this program, discovering what Stafford discovered about the adventure of writing, when he said:

For the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision.

For this remarkable and transformative gift, I extend my deep gratitude to the faculty, staff, and students of the Pacific University MFA in Writing program. You were right, Joe. This is something truly special.

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.

• 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.

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

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.

“A writer is a reader moved to emulation”

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.