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
>
>
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