English 521: Composition Theory and Pedagogy

     In the early winter of 1995-'96, the New York State Writers Institute selected 12 nascent poets for its free, semester-long writing workshop with a renowned Irish poet as instructor. The 12 were chosen from 75 or so who'd applied, each submitting several original poems.

     Right away, one dropped out. So in January, the Irishman phoned on a Saturday afternoon. I would be the 13th, one who didn't make the initial cut, the player to be named later. He made a vague positive comment about a piece I'd submitted -- a cheery, ironical, anti-social screed, snatches constructed like nursery rhymes (direct steal from T.S. Eliot) about the working-class neighborhood where we were living, and about the child abusers on either side, people who probably belonged in jail, and their misshapen kids.

"So we'll see you then?'' he said.

"Yes. Of course.''

     The rejection letter had been very nice. It said my exclusion was in no way a reflection of the merit of my writing, only of the fact that there were many talented poets and few openings: Please try again in the future.

     And planning against that likelihood, I'd registered for a graduate workshop in non-fiction prose at the university. Having been a journalist then for 18 years, writer of thousands of articles, hundreds of feature stories, dozens of reviews, having lately become an editor of a small group talented newspaper feature writers, I didn't expect to learn much from the academy. Poetry was another matter.

     Two of my half-dozen poems had been published in small journals -- out of Woodstock, N.Y., and Little Rock, Ark. They'd been sent blind and accepted, which was giddy validation. They'd been rejected else- where, including the New Yorker. I would discover in the workshop that many new poets send things there with the grand hope that they are the next Rimbaud, the genius unlooked-for, the prodigy, the real thing. With few exceptions, the others in the institute workshop had been published more often, and they generally were older, in their late forties and fifties. With no exceptions, they had written more poetry and had many pieces in progress.

     I began on the second weeknight session out of nine weeks, and the prodigy in this group, a young man whose complex, biblically allusive, sharp-edged poetry the Irishman and select others deeply praised, was first to get workshopped. Some suggestions and criticism were offered. He impatiently explained one or two things about what he was doing, and didn't return the following week to critique everybody else's work. He seemed to have found quickly that there was nothing for him to learn here; he was working at a level most of us weren't even comprehending.

     And so two sessions later, the 14th poet showed up, the other player to be named later, with work that was powerful, emotional, narrative, personal, exposed. Why 14th? Why not second? It seemed unanswerable. The Irishman said he'd tried to get a mix of styles.

     The first round of critiquing by the group was generally polite, with a fair amount of praise. The poet would read, hear the responses, defend whatever he or she thought was misunderstood, why he or she thought the critic or the criticism was wrong.

     ``Well, there's something. What do we think about this?" the Irishman would say after the reading. ``Well, I think what we're saying is we'd like to see more,'' he'd often say at the end of the criticism.

     My problem was that I didn't have any more. The last two poems, penned months earlier, had grown out of a miserable time. My wife and I had gone through a bad patch that lasted months -- a stubborn, intractable disagreement about one thing that discolored everything -- and at the end of it I wrote two angry poems: the one about the neighborhood, "Proletarian paradise in the post-modern," and one about marriage, ``Sad tourist.'' Then in short order she got breast cancer, I got into the workshop, and I quit writing poetry altogether.

     The poet Sharon Olds in 1998 would articulate the problem one afternoon when I interviewed her for the newspaper. More experienced than the young woman who wrote erotically explicit poetry and found devoted readers in the 1970s, she now cautiously described her work as "apparently personal, apparently autobiographical," and said that poetry is art, unbounded by literal fact, and therefore the qualification of "apparently." She would also say that when there have been new editions of old books, she's `"gone back and taken proper names out. ... What I can publish now is extremely limited compared to what I thought I could. ... All this stuff about betrayal ... it's now clearer if I can write it or not.''

     Every poet has to make decisions "about apparently personal poetry they're trying to publish.'' The spectrum goes from `"total loyalty -- I think absolute loyalty, one wouldn't be a writer'' to `"pathological betrayal,'' meaning writing in order to hurt those you know, Olds said. ``I'd say between those two, every writer lives, or writhes.''

     Pulling poetry out of the misery that preceded the workshop year felt like betrayal -- cashing in on the pain of my wife, myself, the troubled neighbor kids. While stooping to make-believe felt wrong. If poetry wasn't about telling the truth, what was it?

     In round two of the critiques, I had nothing to offer, and the group activity had become a sort of group edit, where individuals would make specific suggestions for textual revisions in others' poetry. With five or six sensibilities trying to guide the way, and the Irishman remaining benignly supportive of everything, there seemed to be no productive point anyway. The revised poems that came back near the end -- some of the writers took the suggestions seriously -- seemed to get worse, losing voices.

     On the other hand, the prose work- shop, run by the upstate composition professor's guidelines on critiquing (where he pretty firmly kept a lid on authors defending out loud), as well as his own critiques, was supportive, insightful, useful. Texts improved markedly. Critiques were written, and suggestions were offered with caveats about possible weaknesses in the readers' interpretations. "I read it this way, but ..."

     Statements of opinion often were phrased by the older doctoral students with an interrogatory inflection at the end, as if they were questions as much as judgments, or simply perspectives that may or may not be useful to the writer.

     I began researching and writing a long article on a dead beat poet, brought it in for workshops, re-worked parts, and later would get it published in The Little Magazine and then taken by a small journal in Youngstown, Ohio. The poet had been dead almost a decade. Some of his pieces were very good and little known. (This way they got read again.) There wasn't anyone left to betray. They'd moved on.

     Everyone seemed to make progress in the university workshop. Parts of dissertations were written there, plus some other articles that were later published.

     One anomaly was the apparent novel in progress by the tall transsexual who didn't seem to change a word and simply wanted a supportive audience and a place to workshop. The question about the blurry line between fiction and non-fiction, even with the professor weighing in, seemed, finally, specious, self-indulgent. But the rhetoric on the point remained abstract not personal, not an attack, just differing points of view.

     The written critiques were more thoughtful than the verbal releases in the poetry session. Keeping the author quiet smoothed the dynamics. Emphasis on being supportive and the vagaries of reading -- the space between what the writer thinks she's done and what the reader takes from it -- was constantly acknowledged. Right and wrong didn't really come up as meaningful constructs.

     Nobody had been rejected from the workshop; nobody quit who was there on day one; everyone got course credit; and I believe everyone somehow paid or otherwise offset the expense of almost $1,000 for the course. And nobody brought wine, which was also different. Though on the last day, we met across the road for pitchers of beer.

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