A Writer's notebook, Day One-Hundred-Fifty-Five

Today was a really exciting day, and I feel incredibly enthused.  First, I had my workshop with Nickole Brown, who is incredible in general and who is now getting to know me well enough to really not pull her punches, which I appreciate genuinely.  She essentially said that she recognizes I have the knowledge and talent but that I am not doing the work I need to be and challenged me to get my act together and do the work.  That's not to say that she didn't appreciate the work itself, but she pointed out many of the flaws in it that I need to address  to make it more accessible.  That these are ideas I understand and have heard before, as she pointed out, does not make her comments any more valuable for me.  I really feel quite lucky to have someone essentially put the challenge that I have been facing internally into a format that is so much simpler and more externalized, and I find it really meaningful to me that someone would care enough to make these comments, as I know it is not an easy thing, or something that all people would respond to with understanding for the spirit in which it was meant.

My workshop today was also incredible, surpassing any expectations I could have had for the class. Gregory Pardlo is so smart that I really am awed by just how much I learnt in that first introductory class.  It truly has me rethinking many of the ideas I've held about poetry, or at least considering them in a different light.  The central issue in the class is that of voice.  In part, that is about defining the concept, but we were taken to an even deeper level beneath this, in order to ask a series of more and more provocative questions that got towards some very intrinsic ideas.  In some ways, it reminded me a lesson I once had on Buddhism, but in a way that makes that initial discussion feel fairly random and minor.  

For one thing, we began to examine what a poem is on the most basic level.  What is it that a poem is made up of.  Through this question, we examined our own internal prejudices about the nature of poetry and what it means for a thing to be a poem at all.  I am still getting a hold on much of it, but I can say that I have certain ideas that feel fairly connected for me, from what I experienced.

To begin with, in terms of understanding the concept of voice.  Now, this is something that is often difficult to put into a box, obviously, because it doesn't really exist inside any particular element of the work in a way that can be pointed at.  But what was really interesting to consider, which was brought up tonight, was the idea that we are largely incapable of ever sensing our own voice, and that our sense of taste is ruled by our own voice.  Essentially, voice exists at the level of our own understanding of language.  In essence, voice is how we utilize language, and includes all the language we have possible access to in some way, so anything that I write must be an expression of it, as it comes through my understanding of language.  

Pushing this to another level, though, the question then turned around, largely, to one of examining our own perspective.  In essence, the desire of a reader in encountering a poem is for that piece of work to provide an experience and a set of meanings that they can understand, interpret, and appreciate, and the way to do that is for the work to meet this reader wherever they happen to be right now.  As Pardlo put it, essentially, as readers we want the writer to put the meaning of the poem into a format that is compatible with our own personal preferences.  In critiquing work, we often can fall pray to wanting the work to be what we ourselves like and find meaningful, which is not useful, all the time.  First, in a workshop, we are often applying ideas that are not relevant for the poet.  They exist in a world of language that is not the same as my own, and thus my reading of that work is always going to be something different than what is intended by the writer.  In essence, we like work that is what we like, and that is not a particularly useful rubric.

At this point, I am not certain where any of that leads, really, but a large part of it is about challenging our preconceptions about poetry, and our own poetry in particular.  I am really excited to see how class goes tomorrow.