A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Hundred-And-Sixty

Today was the final day of the festival, and while I am saddened at it ending, I am quite energized, and really excited.  I think that I have a great deal of thinking to do, and I am also very happy with the work that I am producing.  I just wrote a poem moments before starting this blog, and I am very happy with the first draft.

What I really want to think about today, for a moment, though, is the way that the class was conducted and what I believe that I learnt from this experience.  In many ways, I want to find aspects of this that I can adapt into my own teaching, as it is an exceptional way to run a class, and I feel that I learned a huge amount. 
Specifically, what I really appreciated most was that the focus of the class wasn't on improving the poems, but on seeing them as examples of the poet's work.  Our opinions about the work was not relevant at all, in terms of assessing it, as that is only an exercise in personal aesthetic.  In order to alter that norm, what happened in the Gregory Pardlo class, however, is that the class would look at several pieces of a poets work, discussing it as a collective example of the poet's work.  Specifically, the class would endeavor to look at the specific techniques and approaches in the work.  

This means that the class was focusing on looking at the work and pulling out the specifics of it in terms of the qualities of how it ran.  For instance, we might discuss the emotional color of the poem, the kinds of imagery, the sound, the general themes, the structures.  The key issue was, however, that we were looking at the work without making any suggestions about how it could be changed or improved.  Instead, we took the work as it exists, and discussed it in order to understand the writer better.

At the end of this, the class would then discuss a poem that the poet should write which is directly opposed to their normal moves.  The idea is that the exercise is intended to force the writer out of their comfort zone.  In looking at the work of the poet, the class assembles a general idea of the poet's oeuvre, and then attempt to create a challenge that will make them do work that cannot rely upon those typical habits.  The attempt is to push the work in new directions in order to learn how do something new, and it is an incredibly exciting way to work.  It focuses on getting better over-all and not on looking at that single poem all of the time, though it is not anti-revisio.  The point is, however, to get the participants to do work that is new and daring for them and that will make them a better poet.

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