I have no anecdotes for this post. My mind is preoccupied. I am dreading the next week. Grading and trying to edit my own paper is going to kick my ass, but after that, Oh after that, FREEDOM! I can see it ringing from high on the mountain top *inmyownmartinlutherkingjrvoice* But in all seriousness, I haven't written a poem in a week. Not a good one at least, and this is a problem. I usually crank out two or three, sometimes four or five mediocre poems--poems worth editing. Grad school has actually impeded my writing. Isn't that strange? I go to school to learn how to write better, and I end up not writing at all. There's something very wrong with this system. At least the poems I have written have improved. Sadly, by improved I mean they've been accepted as good by convention, canonical standards and that's so boring. Every time I try to be even remotely experimental by using a shocking word or form (which is not experiment by the way because its been done a zillion times before) someone's got piss on my poem (and its usually a result of a poor reading).
For example, take the word cunt. It is charged with connotations. When you see it in a poem, a large part of the poem relies on that one word and all of its possible meanings. Whether or not you know all of the connotations, it doesn't matter. They're still there. You cannot simply say the poem does not work because of one word unless you give a better reason than "cunt doesn't fit or comes on too strong." As a reader, that means you're not doing your job. Read the poem for god sakes.
Workshop is a necessary evil. Actually, I'm not so sure it's necessary. Half of the people that show up to workshop either haven't read the poem, read it five minutes before class, or are too drunk to even read the poem. Others bring up arbitrary questions concerning ancient poets and their connection to contemporary poetry, as if either poets (me + Homer) could be in conversation with each other. "What would Plato do?" He'd be scared of a fucking telephone. That's what he'd do. He wouldn't understand a word of our work nor should we respond to his work unless its in an interesting way (and most likely it isn't). We've been too far removed. Anything we'd be responding to is just in our collective consciousness (which has, with time, become cliche).
I hope you can tell I'm kidding, kind of. While I rag on the workshop, I am just as much of an obnoxious idiot. Here's something I would say. "You use the word technology, which seems to be in conflict with the natural scenes you are building. They are not quite in juxtaposition with each other, and they don't seem to share the same space either. The tone...rabble rabble....the form isn't working but I don't know why...rabble rabble rabble*hiccup*."
Sometimes we'll agree on a reading of a poem then limit the rest of the workshop to that reading. How reductive! How dull!
[The real motive behind this blog post is to not finish my Heart of Darkness paper. Don't even get me started on that. Why I am basically getting an MA when I applied for an MFA, I don't know. I'll benefit from the teaching and reading literature, but I do that anyway because I like it, so why make it a mandatory part of the curriculum.]
This rant has gone on too long. If I had a conscience, it would have said stop it! stop it! Your readers don't understand what you're talking about or they don't care!
so I'll stop in honor of the conscience I don't have.
...
Carry on.
No comments:
Post a Comment