Tag Archives: revision

Supportive critique

One discipline that keeps me practicing as a poet is ongoing, regular discussion of new work. It has been my great good fortune to be part of a critique group that has been meeting monthly for, I believe, over 20 years! Our participants have come and gone a bit; the group consists of four long-time stalwarts and up to three others. We try to keep to under seven members or the discussions get too lengthy for one evening.

When one has participated in a group like this for a long time, the occasional issue of expected responses comes up. At least, it does for me. When I choose a poem to workshop with my critique group, I might say to myself, “X prefers more narrative poems…Q will think this too wordy…Z will probably correct the dangling modifier…”

If I begin to expect certain stereotyped reactions, one could ask, why bother being part of a group with the same people in it all the time? Would it be more helpful to scout around for novel feedback?

Actually, no. While I am sometimes correct in my expectations of a group member’s initial feedback (and I am often wrong!), the discussions that evolve from that point onward prove tremendously useful. What I learn and can use as inspiration to revise tends to arise from other group members’ questions, challenges, and misreadings; unexpected revision ideas appear during brainstorming, and bouncing the ideas off of others helps me recognize that the poem must communicate or die.

These are good things which nourish the creative impulse.

When we do take on a new member, we fear that he or she may be a bit shocked by our frankness with one another: after 20 years, there’s not quite as much need to dance politely around a poem that isn’t doing its job. But those who settle in with us see that we practice non-defensive openness and that we always find genuine things to praise. Our group purpose is to assist one another in writing the best work we can. That means analysis and criticism, but it also means encouragement and generosity of spirit. It offers us exchange of accomplishments, prompts, book suggestions, setbacks, joys, and sorrows (there have been more than a few).

It may be a small community, but it is a community. And my fellow participants are as supportive as any community I have been part of these past two decades. They take our writing commitment seriously, recognizing that critique is just another step in the process and that dissenting ideas can get us toward brilliance. Once in awhile.

Some endings

On a bleak wet day: thinking about revising my poems. The pile of “needs work” drafts appears daunting; I have put off for too long the required work of rethinking, the hard, conscientious effort–and unstructured time–necessary to the craft. I have always enjoyed the task of revision because it offers a chance to revisit the initial urges of the poem and to refine and reconsider my ideas, but lately my motivation has abandoned me.

I notice, above, all of the words that begin with “re.”

Latin: “in the matter of” or, (res), “thing.” But as a prefix: “again,” likewise, to indicate a backwards or repetitive motion.

revise   §    require      §      revisit     §    refine   §

    rethink    §     reconsider

Maybe I am eager to move forward instead of always going back. Nevertheless, one method of moving on is to complete what one is working on so as to create a sense of closure. Sometimes, all a poem needs is a better ending.

When I think of revision under that perspective, as a means of completing an unfinished job in order to prepare for the next, new task, the pile seems slightly less unmanageable.

And by way of re-envisioning the endings…Molly Spencer’s blog The Stanza offers a good list of closure options here.

sunset1~The ending of a day~

 

Online workshops

For the month of October, I participated in an online poetry workshop with Daisy Fried (see this post). I enjoyed the workshop and gained a great deal from it; I wish I had had a little more time to put into the writing, however. As is often the case, “life intervened” and I did not find quite as much creative writing time in the month as I had hoped.

Then again, all writers have to juggle. Life intervenes, always. How dedicated are we to making art? We have to ask ourselves that now and then. If distractions too readily remove us from the genuine work, maybe we’re dilettantes. On the other hand, not all of us choose to devote 100% of ourselves to the work. That does not make us less serious about the hours it takes to compose art.

One thing I learned from the online workshop experience is that, with the right participants (our group seemed well-chosen), you can get to know one anothers’ work and topic concerns fairly quickly, and even glean things about personality, cultural background, and literary influences of the people in the group. This may be more true for writers than for other artists, perhaps, as writers are experienced at…well, writing…which is how the critique and feedback exchanges operate on these forums (via comments). The exchanges were interesting and useful because the perspectives varied greatly; and instead of talking together in a room real-time, and perhaps feeling inhibited by face-to-face shyness or fear of interrupting one another, the participants had time to write our thoughts and think a bit before posting feedback.

The downside of an online workshop, for me, mostly entails the quantity of on-screen reading necessary for full participation. I suppose I could have printed the lectures and comments, but that seemed a waste of paper and was not simple because of the Blogger-framework, the format of which does not play well with my printer defaults. Ah, technology! How I love and hate it! And the beauty of a face-to-face workshop is the beauty of human beings, faces, flesh, vocal tones, body language, gesture–subtleties lost in a virtual forum. When I was enrolled in my MFA program at Goddard, the intensity of the low-residency on-campus workshops and lectures were crucial (and irreplaceable).

Nonetheless, I found the workshop online this past month to be a valuable learning experience that expanded my thinking about poems and narrative, about revision and experimentation, and about the various modes of teaching or critiquing. I recognized, for example, how much preparation Daisy had to do to organize a one-month online workshop, how much organization, and how much thought as to purpose and guidance and feedback, let alone figuring out which low-cost method to employ to deliver the lecture, set the context, and permit easy and rapid feedback on the part of both teacher and students. Not an easy task, and she did a yeoman’s job of it. One thing I deeply appreciated was Fried’s devotion to the value of deep revision rather than just to tweaking the draft. I had forgotten how I used to wildly and almost randomly revise drafts “just to see” what might happen if I made radical changes. Often I would return to the earlier draft with renewed focus, and sometimes the radical revision took the poems to much more interesting places. These days, when I have less time to mull and experiment, I tend to stay on the safe side and take fewer risks with revision. Risk is worth it, though. I need to get back to that approach.

All in all, a positive workshop experience, and one which yielded a couple of poems worth revising and some poetry colleagues whose work I like and whose feedback I value and may tap in future (who knows?). Without leaving home.

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