the B I G exception to critiques of conventional workshop practice in
the UK is Writers Forum.
I've written quite a bit about it and so i won't repeat that . . .
but it did provide an exemplary rejoinder
in and of itself.
xx
cris
On Aug 12, 2009, at 1:47 PM, Jeffrey Side wrote:
> Brilliant analysis, Tim. This may placate some of the responders to
> my original
> post.
>
>
>
> On Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:25:40 +0100, Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
>> Carrie, Alison Mairead etc,
>>
>> Rupert was right when he said that I was referring to a historical
>> thing here in England. I don't mean my anti-workshop thing to be a
>> blanket criticism. If it does apply on a larger and wider scale it
>> wouldn't surprise me though.
>>
>> Something began to happen in British poetry workshops during the late
>> 70's. It happened very gradually but seemed to be evenly spread, both
>> horizontally (geographically) and vertically (poetry standard of
>> facilitator and workshopers). It was related to other things
>> happening in society and culture at the time, obviously - what is not
>> so obvious is which was chicken and which was egg? And of course
>> there
>> were always exceptions (particularly around the avant circles and
>> certain excellent teachers) - what I am talking about is a general
>> drift.
>>
>> Workshops in community centers and adult learning centers and other
>> such places came out of a genuine desire of people to be creative and
>> to find out how to do better something they were already into. Those
>> early workshops, many of which had grown out of late 60's values of
>> freedom, democracy and tolerance, were fun and often quite
>> successful.
>> But it didn't last. They bit by bit became more prescriptive, less
>> democratic, less tolerant and more focused on producing the 'good'
>> poem. It was this obsession with producing the 'poem' which became
>> the
>> bugbear because it replaced long-term goals (the development of a
>> writer) with the short term goal (writing something that would be
>> good
>> enough to get published, or right enough to please the tutor etc.)
>> This is not just down to the poet/teacher either, it is down to the
>> participants just as much, if not more in some cases. I must
>> emphasize
>> it, this didn't happen over night, it took at least a decade. Getting
>> people to follow certain basic rules so they don't make the kind of
>> errors that will make a poem unworkable, is not a hard thing to
>> do. We
>> all know these rules, such things as staying away from abstract nouns
>> and so on. And the positives were simple to guide people into - write
>> what you know etc., (If I had ever followed that advice when I was
>> younger I would never have written anything.) My main point regarding
>> this, how such a thing became such an influence, is the way such
>> 'teaching points', meant as guides to those starting out in the
>> artform, became THE RULES for ever, and for everyone. None of this
>> was
>> to do with conscious decisions, just processes, like evolution.
>>
>> If you don't believe me go and plough out all those old poetry
>> magazines from the 80's and 90's - you will find clone after clone of
>> the same 'workshop' poem. One of the great ironies of the whole thing
>> was the way the those involved with workshops used to spout on about
>> individuality, related of course to that 'writing what you know'
>> thing, but the more they talked about being true to yourself the more
>> all the poems began to resemble each other.
>>
>> Tim A.
>>
>> On 11 Aug 2009, at 00:31, Carrie Etter wrote:
>>
>>> Some of these comments about workshops sound like they're based more
>>> on supposition and hearsay than numerous, varied experiences. Ulli
>>> Freer used to--does he still?--run a workshop at Birkbeck which I
>>> heard was anything but dictatorial and didactic, and I've got to say
>>> the workshops I run at Bath Spa do anything but espouse convention
>>> and conformity (which could be didactic in itself, if you consider
>>> the general initiative toward originality to be didactic). Different
>>> instructors have different approaches, of course, and I despise the
>>> general category referred to earlier as "domestic realism" (which I
>>> find still painfully rampant), but I don't think the workshop itself
>>> is at fault so much as individual instructors' attitudes toward
>>> their purpose.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:28:52 +0100
>>> From: Jeffrey Side <[log in to unmask]>
>>> Subject: Re: Found a good article called 'POETRY SCENE: CURRENT
>>> DIFFICULTIES'
>>>
>>> Tim, needless to say I agree with you. I find that workshops tend to
>>> be r=
>>> un by=20
>>> poetic dictators who are more concerned with peddling their own
>>> ideas of=20=
>>>
>>> what a poem is than trying to facilitate genuine curiosity in the
>>> people=20=
>>>
>>> they "teach". It is this didactical element that I find disturbing,
>>> and e=
>>> xplains=20
>>> why (as you say) workshops have had such a big influence on poetry
>>> in=20
>>> Britain.=20
>>
>>
|