Donald Hall on the cons and pros of poetry workshops.

Excerpt from interview with Donald Hall in THE PARIS REVIEW:

INTERVIEWER

Marianne Moore went to school and she wrote poetry, but she did not study creative writing in school. Do you think the institution of the creative writing program has helped the cause of poetry?

HALL

Well, not really, no. I’ve said some nasty things about these programs. The Creative Writing Industry invites us to use poetry to achieve other ends—a job, a promotion, a bibliography, money, notoriety. I loathe the trivialization of poetry that happens in creative writing classes. Teachers set exercises to stimulate subject matter: Write a poem about an imaginary landscape with real people in it. Write about a place your parents lived in before you were born. We have enough terrible poetry around without encouraging more of it. Workshops make workshop-poems. Also, workshops encourage a kind of local competition, being better than the poet who sits next to you—in place of the useful competition of trying to be better than Dante. Also, they encourage a groupishness, an old-boy and -girl network that often endures for decades.

The good thing about workshops is that they provide a place where young poets can gather and argue—the artificial café. We’re a big country without a literary capital. Young poets from different isolated areas all over the country can gather with others of their kind.

And I suppose that workshops have contributed to all the attention that poetry’s been getting in the last decades. Newspaper people and essayists always whine about how we don’t read poetry the way we used to—in the twenties, for example. Bullshit! Just compare the numbers of books of poems sold then and now. Even in the fifties, a book of poems published by some eminent poet was printed in an edition of a thousand hardback copies. If it sold out everyone was cheerful. In 1923 Harmonium didn’t sell out—Stevens was remaindered, for heaven’s sake! A book of poetry today by a poet who’s been around will be published in an edition of five to seven thousand copies and often reprinted.

But it’s not the Creative Writing Industry itself that sells books; it’s the poetry readings. Practically nobody in the twenties and thirties and forties did readings. Vachel Lindsay, early, then Carl Sandburg, then Robert Frost—nobody else. If you look at biographies of Stevens and Williams and Moore, you see that they read their poems once every two years if they were lucky. Poetry readings started to grow when Dylan Thomas came over in the late forties and fifties. By this time there are three million poetry readings a year in the United States. Oh, no one knows how many there are. Sometimes I think I do three million a year.

In the sixties when the poetry reading boom got going people went to their state universities and heard poets read. When they went back to their towns they got the community college to bring poets in or they set up their own series through an arts group. Readings have proliferated enormously and spread sideways from universities to community colleges, prep schools, and arts associations. I used to think, Well, this is nice while it lasts but it’ll go away. It hasn’t gone away. There are more than ever.

New poem: 200 BAD POEMS FOR BILLY COLLINS

'Everybody is born with at least 200 bad poems in them. It's best to get rid of them
by college.' --Billy Collins

hello Billy

you don’t know me

but I read your recent comment

and bundled 200 of my poems,

leaving them at the bottom of your driveway

for potential evaluation

I’m aware of how hard it is

to be accepted by Academia--

particularly when you, Billy Collins,

write poems that are easy

for most people to understand

and, to a lot of poets,

it means you’re not trying hard enough

okay, I get it,

you made that 200 bad poems comment

to keep your credibility

with the poets eternally upset

over how you sell more books

than they ever will

also, there’s that desire for intellectual bragging rights

when you appear onstage with Paul Simon and Aimee Mann

and get super-duper-eager to claim your poems

as existing on an equal plane to their lyrics

so go on, Billy,

keep talking about how elevated you are

and how bad all the beginners are

plus all the self-educated poets

like Adam Driver’s Paterson

(in the movie of the same name )

of course, they’re bad too

because they choose not to publish

or share their art

through accepted channels

with people like you

so, here are my 200 poems

destined to enter your blue recycling can

without even a glance at my cover letter

as you regret your long-ago misstep

of criticizing MFA programs

during one of your book tours,

believing this outburst of candor

about homogenized poetry

led to amateur me

annoying distinguished you

Billy Collins explains serious poetry training to you.

In the past, I've appreciated Billy Collins's skill at being both well-crafted and accessible.  I even saw him a couple of times- (Skirball Cultural Center and Pepperdine University).

At Skirball, he seemed to be critical of MFA programs (which most poets consider vital to being taken seriously).

But he now seems to be no more than the kind of pedant routinely found in poetry circles--the kind of person who will inevitably make a snide reference to first-person poems (often, young poets start by writing about their experiences) as diary/journal entry poems or "teenage angst."

And, to top it off, you're not "real" if you don't read every syllable of The Classic Poets/Authors/Thinkers.

Here's Billy harrumphing at perceived Straw Amateurs  via the NPR website:

It really  lies in the simple act of reading tons of poetry. And I mean not just stuff you find in magazines but if you really want to be trained in poetry you need to read Milton — you need to read Paradise Lost. You need to read Wordsworth — you need to read Wordsworth's 'Prelude.'"

"That's if you want to take it seriously. If you don't want to take it seriously, you can just get a 79-cent pen and express yourself," he laughed. "No one's gonna read it with any pleasure because ... you haven't paid attention to what happened in the past."

A rebuttal to the Ryan Boudinot MFA article.

There are over 100 comments about Ryan Boudinot's article on THE STRANGER site--which I excerpted for my last blog post.

Here's one from "emmaz" and I've highlighted a certain passage that perfectly summarizes what I've been trying to say for years about "the poetry community."

The irony of this article is that Boudinot seems to genuinely think that he's courageously speaking a truth that no one wants to hear, when he's actually just spouting the dominant ideology that has held sway for a few hundred years now about the arts. That old saw that creativity is best left to a few genius artists who are "born that way," and if most of the celebrated voices are white and male, then that is just an indication of how God distributes talent. That's a western enlightenment attitude that supports the ruling class and the hegemonic status quo. I personally think that the more people who engage in the arts, in any capacity, the better the arts will be and the more interesting and just our culture will be. Why would we ever want to encourage less participation, if not to police who gets to speak?

Feedback on works-in-progress: advice that works for film or literature.

The passage below is quoted from an article on the filmmaking blog MENTORLESS about Quentin Tarantino's experience at the Sundance Lab in 1991 developing RESERVOIR DOGS (difficult to imagine now, since more recent developed-at-Sundance cinema tends to lean more towards middle-of-the-road ennobling and/or redemptive storytelling).  It can be easily transposed to poetry or literary workshop situations.

Link to the complete article: http://www.mentorless.com/2015/01/26/tarantinos-experience-sundance-lab-1991-can-teach-us-feedbacks?utm_content=buffer7b004&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

What to Keep in Mind When We Ask for Feedback

A lot of people are not aware of the distinction between emotional and constructive feedback and think that giving their emotional opinion is a feedback.

Maybe they don’t have the tools to verbalize or point out to specifics, and then it means that we asked the wrong person to do an impossible task. So, the first step to enhance our chances to get constructive feedback is to ask people who have a certain skill-set and/or knowledge that we think might be helpful.

What to Keep in Mind When We Receive Feedback

I believe that when we receive feedback, we need to ask ourselves what type of feedback we are actually given: are they emotional or constructive feedback?

If we are receiving constructive feedback, then whatever the note, it needs to be acknowledged and considered, even if it hurts, and/or might ultimately been ignored for the purpose of the project we make.

If it’s emotional feedback, then we need to remember that this doesn’t say anything about our ability to tell a story, our work simply didn’t connect enough with the person to ignite constructive feedback.

What to Keep in Mind When We Give Feedback

When we give feedback, we need to put aside our feelings about the piece, and try to use our skills -whatever those skills- to give constructive feedback. That can be offering solutions, that can be giving perspective, and that always imply reminding the other person that those feedback are only suggestions made to inspire and can be ignored. (In other words, it’s not about our ego)

Also, It’s Very Hard for Everybody

It is hard to be honest and give good notes to someone. It is much easier to say that you loved whatever they did, point out to three things you liked and moved on.

And it is hard to receive notes gracefully, even if you know these notes are good notes, a part of you might have hoped to hear that everything was perfect (I know I’ve felt that several times, even though I knew it was not good enough.)

I believe that our job as a community is to help each other out by trying to be generous and genuine while offering constructive feedback, and by being brave enough to share our work with people who can give constructive feedback, and take the result gracefully. It all comes back to being vulnerable.

David Orr, NEW YORK TIMES literary critic, on James Franco, Poet.

Here's Mr. Orr's review of Mr. Franco's book of poems titled DIRECTING HERBERT WHITE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/books/review/james-franco-poet.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

And here's a relevant (at least to me) passage from the review:
"...the annoyance this collection will inspire is rooted in a deeper anxiety: The attention commanded by James Franco’s poetry has everything to do with “James Franco” and almost nothing to do with poetry. And that cultural wealth is not transferable. Attention withheld from Franco’s poems will not instantly devolve upon some worthy but obscure poet; it will go to another actor, or singer, or commercial nonfiction writer, or memoirist — or even to James Franco in his novel-writing incarnation. Poetry is the weak sister of its sibling arts, alternately ignored and swaddled like a 19th-century invalid, and that will change only by means of a long, tedious and possibly futile effort at persuasion. Perhaps it’s a blessing to have James Franco on one’s side in that struggle."

Dr. Seuss, THE SNEETCHES and MFA programs.

Someone I follow on Twitter retweeted this photo Josh Sternberg took of a certain wall painting in Phoenix, AZ:
http://ift.tt/1jqHCIp