Gotta guest teach an undergrad beginning poetry workshop in half an hour.
Not sure what I'm going to say.
All the poems are very stale, boring, cliched.
Gotta talk about the difference between writing out your feelings in a journal and writing a poem.
Not that a combo of journal/blogging and other types of discourse can't make a poem.
It's more poetry=self expression than anything I suppose.
most of the students will be very young. Recent high school grads.
I don't think a regular workshop will help them a lot.
Gotta interrogate more than negotiate.
I wish all workshops interrogated assumptions rather than treating the poem as object to perfect and clarify.
Diction is one of the main issues. The romantic.
Maybe I'll ask them if a musician can blow us all away
if they only listen to songs by Elvis?
Or a photographer if they only look at photos
in the NY Times?
How did I actually believe
there was a seperation between the aesthetic and the political
just five years ago?