Provocateurs must eventually renounce their cover.
I took one creative writing course, in 1963. It was a course in
playwriting, it was awful, and I got an A for writing a piece of crap
that the instructor--a dreadful novelist, name withheld--thought was
just fine.
I spent one week in Arkansas in 1996 at a workshop into which I was
admitted tuition-free because that was my period of being a BBPS (Big
Bad Poetry Stud) and for awhile I felt like I could do no wrong. And
hung out with whom?--Stephen Dunn, Lawrence Raab, Andrea Budy, Kim
Addonizio, and C.D. Wright--the latter the most unexpected and powerful
influence on my thought-life even though you could not prove it by how I
write now.
Who got me writing? Probably the most inspiring teacher I ever met, my
senior year English teacher, Jeannette Zansky. It was an honors course
and Jeannette told the class she was going to make college freshman
English seem easy. She didn't lie. I never worked harder or my joyously
for anyone than I did for her. She was a slave-driver and I was at
ramming speed most of the trip. I read: Gilgamesh, chunks of the Bible
(discovery: it's literature!), Medieval troubadour poetry, then big
jumps to De Maupassant (still a favorite), Dostoevsky, Mann (how's
*Buddenbrooks* in high school grab you?), Cervantes, Fitzgerald,
Hemingway, Dreiser...and I wish I owned the syllabus. Jeannette didn't
teach: every day was Pentecost, she had tongues of fire around her head,
she projected a kind of holy spirit, and she changed all our lives. And
she got me kick started as a putative writer. I tried to write fiction.
Poetry scared me because I didn't know what it was. I'm still not sure.
There are more varieties on this list alone than grains of sand in the
desert.
Of course it did not last. It didn't take again until 1990. Nobody ever
*taught* me how to write poetry and 1990 is when I got over my fear and
starting doing it it on my own, in local workshops, and down South, and
after I'd won one serious prize. I still don't have the foggiest idea of
what I'm doing or what my style actually is. Someone in a Portland club
where I read earlier this month referred to my writing as "snarky" and
that's probably correct if it means vaguely edgy, snide, and a bit
bitter. Would I know if I went through an MFA program? I would sure as
hell know how to network. I might refine what I was doing. I'm not sure
what else would happen. I DO know I can't afford the freight.
--
Ken Wolman
http://awfulrowing.wordpress.com/
http://open.salon.com/blog/kenneth_wolman/
http://www.petsit.com/content317832.html
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"All writers are hunters, and parents are the most available prey."--Francine du Plessix Gray
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