In my last post, I referred to an idea Richard Hugo presents in The Triggering Town. Hugo encourages his students to switch their allegiance away from the triggering subject and instead focus upon the words themselves. In a sense, embrace your linguistic and aesthetic predispositions, or "obsessions" and to work within them.
Now, that being said: the writing workshop can work in a somewhat opposing direction. In Chad Davidson and Greg Fraser's manual, Writing Poetry, they warn that "the biggest danger in critiquing poems resides in affective reasoning and 'just becausing'" (89). In Michael's journal he simply created a list of words that he felt attracted to for unknown reasons. I think that this "submission to obsession" works well in many cases and I think is essential to the writing process. However, in the workshop if one were to simply reject the quality of a poem using simple "just because" reasoning, I think the workshop essentially ceases to work effectively. In other words--and to borrow from Writing Poetry again--workshopping should act towards "forming meanings with the text, of helping to create significance rather than passively waiting for it to be delivered." We cannot escape our own aesthetic obsessions, but a workshop, I think, should help form meanings that are multiple and various--to expand meaning rather than to confine it.
Indeed, the workshopping of drafts calls for a different kind of dynamic than that of writing the original draft. At least, when we critique a poem, we want to offer reasons for our particular readings. "Just because" is great when you're drafting. You put a word in a particular place, "just because." Later, however, you're going to ask, "Does this word need to be there? What is it doing? How is it contributing to the draft?" That's the idea behind a workshop. When we look at your poem, you will have fifteen other voices handling that for you. They are, in a sense, fifteen versions of you looking at that draft. Hopefully (inevitably), some of those angles will help you toward the next draft.
ReplyDeleteWhat's more, when a workshop functions well, you will carry those people's voices with you when you sit down to write again.