I guess I should apologize if anyone felt uncomfortable with my poetry on Tuesday. I try to keep it simple and I did not intend to offend anyone with my workshop poem. I got to thinking about it and the teacher did ask me to discuss it after class. I guess I knew where I was coming from when I wrote it and as the writer, I felt it was relatively 'safe.' If anyone took it a different way then I am quite sorry.
It goes to show you that there is something to the audience question. How focused should we be on audience? I try not to write for workshop audience and I don't think that anyone else in our 'classroom community' does. I think we all stick to what is important to us and so what if... seems to be our attitude. I feel like this is a good thing. With that being said I still must apologize to anyone who was offended by my poem.
Gosh, I am almost at a loss for words. I know this is not a place to talk about 'workshop' exactly but I think what I am going to say is safe enough. Ivy mentioned that she didn't feel the first six lines of my last poem we workshopped meshed with the rest of the poem. I find that interesting that she said that because I talked to Dustin Lapray about a month ago and we talked about some of the things that we felt were our poem problems. I told him that I had problems with my own first few lines and he gave me some good advise. Dustin told me that he sometimes struggled with the same issue and that he finds that he often finds a better beginning further down in his poems and ends up cutting his first lines out. I loved this advice. I've been trying to do this in my own work.
This is an interesting concept that we cut out those first lines we've penned. I think the first lines woes are the last bit of holdover from our 'essay' nature.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
goodness, i for one certainly didn’t see anything the least bit offensive in your poem. i totally agree with what you said about not catering to an audience, and writing about what we as poets feel is important.
also…who says “offensive” is a bad quality for a poem to have? i kinda like being offended. it’s not easily accomplished, and i have respect for anyone who can do it, if only for that reason (usually only for that reason). but anyway, shouldn’t poetry be allowed to challenge the way we think about things, maybe introduce ideas that go against even our most deeply-held beliefs? i suppose i should only speak for myself here, but i think this applies to others as well: when something offends me, it forces me to examine why i was offended, what my beliefs/values/etc. are, why i have those beliefs/values/etc., and it’s usually an all-around beneficial experience, even if it seems crappy at first. and if a poem can move me to do those things, then it’s a pretty damn good poem.
maybe you shouldn’t listen to me, because i’m particularly uninterested in whether or not other people are offended by anything i do, say, write, or whathaveyou. but if you are at all interested in my advice, i say write what you want, and if anyone is offended that’s their problem, not yours. there’s no need to apologize.
Post a Comment