A creative writing class, wrote Richard Hugo, is one of the last places in the university where you can go and have your life mean something. "Art lives upon discussion," wrote Henry James, "upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints; and there is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference, though they may be times of honor, are not times of development -- are times, possibly even, of a little dullness." To a great extent, then, your progress as a writer depends upon a free testing and evaluation and presenting of your ideas.

        If it is that important, then, we should take the workshop very seriously. Phil Levine, describing the demanding and inspiring workshop he had with John Berryman, quotes Berryman as saying: "No holding back. One must be ruthless with one's own writing or someone else will be." Besides, as Pliny the Younger wrote, one accepts criticism so readily as those who best deserve praise. (Pliny was one of the first avid workshop and reading advocates, and records a lot of this in his letters.) And Levine himself is fond of asking other teachers if they too have noticed how so many students today seem "coddled." The point is to be analytic. Think of Dante who in his La Vita Nouva, which contains his sonnets and canzoni to Beatrice, intersperses the poetry with objective analyses and accounts of each poem's genesis. Though the Romans and Greeks participated in what we would call "workshops" in the forum, as Pliny notes, Dante's is the first detailed and extensive poem by poem record. We must be able to step back from our work as he does and see it objectively.

        How should we avoid being "coddled?" At UTC we have found that a workshop works best when it is based upon honesty, upon a careful, critical reading of the poems in a larger context of poetry and poetics. What does this mean? This means separating artistic criticism from any implied personal criticism (to take criticism of one's poems as criticism of one's self is rather immature for a writer). It means having enough respect for the art and the poet to offer honest, direct criticism (this is the only way you will get a sense of what works and what doesn't work for the microcosm of others in the workshop). It means having enough commitment to the art to interrogate the various aesthetic principles we all base our poetry upon in the first place, even though we'd often prefer for them to go unchallenged. This comes about when you offer criticisms of poems and others in the class challenge what you say. Both of you have to back up what you say by referring to some larger principle (what makes a metaphor work, for example). The principle, then, is one of interrogation of the poems and the art. The discussion can be very lively, with lost of impassioned disagreements-- in fact, that's probably the best way to learn.

        Our philosophy is that we are ill-served as writers in the long run when we receive a verbal pat on the back or especially effusive praise, though in the short run it makes us feel better. Someone once responded to this idea--"yes, but you can do a lot of damage that way," by which I assume he meant damage to the person's sense of him or her self. Perhaps that is so if we are attached to our words as if they were gospel, but not being critical where criticism is deserved does damage to the poet, and the poem. On the other hand, where poems work, we should point that out. When we see good images, lines, even sometimes whole poems, we should not only say so, but far more importantly, explain why something works. Mean spiritedness has no place: honest criticism does. The assumption is, though, since few of us have been given golden laurels from Parnassus -- or even from the Nobel committee-- that we can all probably use a bit of stiff, honest appraisal.

        The thing is not to be cajoled by a poet's intentions. If you find yourself justifying a poem by referring to some elaborate analysis of intent, then you are not addressing the poem on the page. However, as Marvin Bell often points out, sometimes the weakest part of a poem is where the author is straining to do something new, and maybe we ought to explore that part of the poem, what he calls the ghost poem. Still, we need to be clear that in its present form the poem might not work.

        You may find, too, that the most helpful criticism is actually about other people's poems, especially if you are very close to what you have submitted, for you won't be distracted by personal stakes and instead will focus on the issues. It's not so much whether you happen to like a poem or a poetics that is so important. What is important is that reasons are given and exchanged. You learn to be a good critic of your own work by criticizing the work of others, by speaking out in class and testing your ideas by first articulating them and second by defending them. Again, the more spirited the discussion the more passionately and seriously we are taking our work.

        Focusing on the issues is itself another issue. A workshop is not a fix-it shop where your poems are brought in, put on the lift, given a lube job and then sent to the New Yorker. After a while a student who goes to workshop only for criticism of his or her own poems becomes workshop dependent: someone always has to be there to say what is good or not. So it is important to talk about the general issues, the big picture, as William Matthews so often suggests, and to bring in the work of other poets, contemporary, yes, but traditional and classical poets as well. That way we can see what other poets do, and to see the range of possibilities for our own work. It is one thing, for example, to see James Wright as a wonderfully unique poet to imitate and draw lessons from on the way to writing our own poems. It is far richer and more productive in the long run to see that he adapted his own style from his intense reading of Horace, Hardy, Robinson, Dickens (he did his dissertation on Dickens), and Frost. To know that is to be able to see what other possibilities were there that he didn't use, that is, to see what you yourself might adapt from that tradition. In any case, you should read. And read. Levine reports how Berryman sent him home to RE-read Shakespeare's The Tempest after a class discussion on style. Workshops are limited: they help you think about revision and what your possibilities are. They provide a place for you to talk with your peers, and to extend that conversation beyond class. That let you test out your poetics and your new poems. But you teach yourself how to write by reading. A good workshop is going to suggest who to read to fill in your gaps.

        One thing your reading will tell you is that the heart of the poem is not the subject. As Matthews points out in a smart and witty essay, "Dull Subjects," there are only a few trite themes. What makes the subjects unique, and powerful and compelling is the poet's engagement with the imagination, that is, with the language, what poems are made out of. Sydney, way back in the renaissance, called this most basic quality, energia. According to him, Energy in poetry derives from fresh metaphors, figures of speech, and original use of language.

        If you haven't been in a workshop class before you may find the logistics strange. For the UTC Poetry class, you are expected to complete about 8 new poems as a minimum during the semester; these should not be passed in all at once during the semester-- space them every couple of weeks. Work on revisions in between new poems. You are also expected to complete the assignments, though you should try them all. The reason for this is that sometimes an assignment will interfere with what you are working on in your own poems, and sometimes an assignment just won't work for you. How do you pass work in? Your work can be passed in at the envelope outside my door at Holt 333 (single copy which will be duplicated by us) on a pregiven day, usually 3-4 before class day, or you can turn it in at one class for a following week's class (enough copies for entire class in this case). You should also be reading far beyond what is assigned or passed out in class if you are serious about your writing. (Don't just read people that sound like you or whom you are attached to-- read a variety, and let it influence your thinking and writing. You can't read enough.) The Meacham Workshops occur every semester, usually after mid-term, for a whole weekend. In this case visiting writers come to campus for individual conferences, workshops and readings. You usually have to pass in 5 poems in multiple, collated copies. There are special dates and places so you should consult the brochure each semester.

        In a given workshop poems are passed out and discussed in the way I described above. The author never speaks to defend his or her work: it either works on the page or it doesn't. Some workshops allow the author comments at the end of the discussion, but I find that is not useful and leads to the author defending the work in some manner. Besides, the frustration, which is what you will have to suffer in the real world of editors, rejection slips, and bad reviews, is a good catalyst. On the other hand, we subscribe to Heidegger's notion of the teacher: "teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than-- learning. His conduct therefore often produces the impression that we learn nothing from him, if by 'learning' we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information. The teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this alone, that he has far more to learn than they -- he has to learn to let them learn. The teacher must be capable of being more teachable than his apprentices. The teacher is far less assured of his ground than those who learn are of theirs. If the relationship between the teacher and the taught is genuine, therefore, there is never a place in it for the authority of the know-it-all or the authoritative sway of the official."

        At UTC we strive for an environment where we take your work seriously. The arguments in class are over the poems and the poetics we offer. Coincident with this seriousness and honesty is a respect for others. More than that, we find that while we may argue vehemently in class over issues, we are also mature enough to be friends and socialize outside of class. In fact, often the classes use a good deal of comedy and self irony, outright laughter and joking around, to take the edge off the criticism. As one student once said, taking ourselves and our art seriously does not mean to keep a Puritan's frown. Poetry is play, as Auden tells us, and so it ought to be fun. One of the most important aspects of the writing community here is a sense of support. Again, this does not mean false praise; it means taking each other seriously enough to offer the criticism that will help us improve as writers. Many of you will improve incredibly, and have. For example, a number of UTC undergraduates have published their work in journals such as Antioch Review, Tar River Poetry, Nebraska Review, Prairie Schooner, Long Pond Review, Pembroke Magazine and others. But then, that means nothing: as Berryman told Levine once, he was happy to see that Phil had been fooling editors with his poems. That's the best attitude to take, and the one that will keep you straight on the path to improving. Then what? Graduate school? Maybe. Of the 35 UTC students who have graduated and applied for poetry fellowships or assistantships in Creative Writing in the past 12 years, all 35 have had at least one offer, and all to places like Iowa, Houston, Pitt, UNC-Greensboro, Alabama, Washington, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Arizona, Virginia, Indiana, Maryland. That may be down the road for some of you. For others, it may not be something you want to pursue. In fact, it is irrelevant except to illustrate the seriousness of the students, and the sense of community here. The main point of the workshop is simply to have you write better than when you began, and to learn how to evaluate your own work. All of this takes a lot of effort. "Friends," Berryman said "it's hard work, and the hard work will test the sincerity of your desire to be poets."

        So what I was getting from all of this was a radical sense of the movement, the dynamic, the structure of process of a work that in fact is the key to everything else in it. It is almost as if you can graph this movement. Whenever I have looked at poems, whether to edit them for a variety of journals and anthologies, to read them for my own pleasure, talk about them in workshops and lectures, or to edit my own work, I always have looked first at this basic sort of movement. The trouble has been that it is fairly amorphous and difficult to talk about, and so I have usually talked about the effects hoping that after a while students would get a sense of that essential inner movement. I should point out there that whenever I talk to other poets about poetry and poems we talk on this level of how poems move, their internal patterns, not the way literature professors and teachers talk, not even a common sort of workshop surface talk. I'm not exactly sure of the other origins of my ideas about pace and timing, rhythm and meter: classical music is certainly a model (I used Brahms Violin Concerto as a model for the structure of my second book of poems, Coltrane and opera for the third, Dylan's sense of metaphor for the first). Certainly also it was hearing people like Dylan Thomas on records, or poets live such as WS Merwin and James Wright that have been lasting influences. The bottom line to all of this, if there is one, is simply to find a way of talking about poems dynamically, to read like a writer. To be more blunt, I think that methods of reading and thinking about poems that pull out philosophies, themes, symbols, allegories, hidden meanings and the like, and see them hung over the scaffolding of some static and inert skeleton of a form, are simply bogus. Those methods may have something to do with philosophy, or history, or biography, but they have nothing to do with poetry.

        I remember a few years ago talking with Stanley Plumly about the impossibility yet the necessity of talking about/teaching/dealing with content in a poetry workshop. While this approach I am describing seems to focus entirely on language as the motivator behind poems, I mean it in a larger sense, what Stanley and I were talking about, a sense of how poems might resonate in a deeper way, how the language might suggest a more rich sense of associations, meaning-- of content, really. So the aim here is not some hollow exercise in so called language poetry, but rather a fuller, more mature, more resonate poem, a poem of vision rather than of simply seeing, of imagination rather than reportage.

        What I have been working towards is a three fold sense of rhythm that I think is essential to all poetry and which, amorphous as it is, can be adapted to our discussions. Indeed, I did a workshop at a writers conference this past August where we did just that. I suppose in some ways it has to do with what Ezra Pound once described in his essay "How To Read" as three levels of writing. The first is melopoeia, how the words get charged with a musical effect, something someone who doesn't even know the language can hear. This has to do with the surface format of the poem only. But poetry is more than that, he says, it is also phanopoeia, how the words that comprise the music also are images that suggest visual things (the analogy so far, then, is to music and poetry). For Cesare Pavese, the great 20th Century Italian poet, this means an image story or image narrative-- a sense of how the implications of the images and perceptions, their connotations and suggestions, themselves make a story-- a narrative of the readers emotive responses. The final and most important thing about poetry is logopoeia, "the dance of intellect among words." Dance suggests the rhythm, the music on a larger scale than just mere sounds, and the intellect suggests that the images relate to larger contexts. I believe this is what Gross is getting at in his book, Sound and Form in Modern Poetry, for instance. Logopoeia has to do with the the underpinnings of the image narrative, with transport, with energy of language: it suggests an investment of the poet's whole being in the poem, especially since intellect as he uses it in the context of the Greek definitions includes emotion-- it means something like consciousness, awareness. What is at stake, then, is one's whole being. [An interesting sidelight: Pound, as many poets today, suggests that in translation it is this third level that is most crucial. So for example, in another class I am using the Fagles translation of Homer's Odyssey which, by all accounts of the classical scholars I know, captures the dance of Homer's intellect, while the Lattimore translation I used to use (and am still fond of many passages) is closer to the surface rendering. So in the Fagles one sacrifices absolute accuracy for a poetic rendering that captures that dance; in the Lattimore one sacrifices the dance for a more accurate literal translation that doesn't capture much of that dance. perhaps it depends on whether one wants to read the poem as a poem or as a piece of scholarship-- or perhaps, as many suggest, all the versions are really needed] and the speaker should be a collator. )

        For my purposes I am going to call the three levels I have in mind, the surface FORMAT, the underlying IMAGE NARRATIVE or FORM and the STRUCTURAL DYNAMIC. If we were looking at a ShakespeareWhat I propose, then, is a slightly abstract and meta-poetic sort of reading. Let's take the case of Shakespeare's KING LEAR, which I want to read here as a dramatic poem rather than a poetic drama.

1.STRUCTURAL DYNAMIC
        On the deepest level I want to start with the sense of the language; immediately obvious to me is a disparity of types of vocabulary. Some characters (Lear, Cordelia, Gloucester, Edgar, etc.) speak a language based on images of the natural world; others (Goneril, Regan, Albany, etc) speak a language of commerce; one is emotive, the other calculated; one is of the heart, the other of the pocketbook. So this sets up a sort of dichotomy, a sense of poles that reflect two basic categories of thinking and feeling, two basic habits of thought-- and so two value systems.
        So, where does this leave us? -- how do these two poles work themselves out in the play-- we can probably sense that commercial language which tends to dominate the opening gives way to the emotional (often out of control) language of the middle scenes which gives way in turn to the last part of the poem that tends to try to balance these, but with an emphasis on the emotional. It almost feels as if you could graph the movement of the play in terms of the levels of its language, high being the more rational, low being the more emotive this way:
 
 

There are probably lots of various versions you can imagine, but that is not the point. Once you have come to grips with some of the basic abstract issues of language then you can begin to see some sort of structure of movement that tends to govern the poem. When you have done this then you can start to move to the next level and finally to the surface, that is, to the editorial corrections and considerations we often make in workshop.

2.FORM
        On the formal level we can see this work itself out in linguistic gestures. "The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind," Stevens says in "Connoisseur of Chaos."--"And yet relation appears,/ A small relation expanding like the shade/ Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of the hill. Relation--how you pull things together in language, in the poem the way things, whatever they are, get connected. For example, there are three scenes in the third act, 2,4 and 6, that show this sort of movement in miniature and taken together, also reflect it. In each scene there is an opening that is relatively calm, then the language degenerates, only to be provisionally saved at the end-- a structure that reflects the larger structure I discussed above. For example in scene 2 Lear starts off talking in metaphysical terms about nature, the dialogue then gets rather legalistic in its vocabulary (metaphors of government and taxation) then degenerates into sexual innuendo until being uplifted by the Fool's aphoristic and rationally presented couplets; in scene 6 it is Edgar's balanced couplets that seem to rescue the day. It is this movement that marks or manifests the emotional trajectory of the play and which I would call the form. It results from the rhythm of thinking and feeling that Eliot describes, the sort of tune rhythm that Yeats mentions-- It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing, William Matthews wrote as the title of a poem, himself borrowing the title from popular tune and we could call form in this sense the swing of the poem. And Stanley Plumly is most helpful here when he talks about the vertical rhythm of a poem, its flow down the page, counterpointed against the linear rhythm of each line-- how the poem moves.

3. FORMAT
        Unfortunately, this is usually the focus in literature classes-- an approach that makes poems, stale, boring, senseless in terms of the reasons they are constructed one way or another, and all too often for the student, mysterious. This is the level that many teachers use to go on witch hunts for symbols, from Christ symbols to phallic symbols, to the dismay of newly lost readers. It is the level where someone tells you what the poem means and if that's all there is too it-- besides the window dressing of some rhyme and meter and images--then you were probably right in asking yourself, why didn't the poet just say that? On the other hand, it shouldn't all be a mystery. In our case, it is one thing to see King Lear as recording a plot that shows the gradual breakdown and breakup of a kingdom, with a fall into gross pathos in act three, and then, after more tribulations, a restoration of some semblance of order at the end.
        But when we look at the tensions from the dynamic level, then perhaps it is clearer what force the running around in the battle scenes in Act V has, so accelerating the now chaotic rush of events in contrast to the earlier slow and painful deliberations and speeches, and it adds to our understanding of the precarious balance at the end punctuated by news of the various deaths (and the play between what is spoken and what is not, what is proclaimed for calm and what bursts upon the scene as outcry), even our understanding of the inner and outer weather of the play in various modes of speech. In other words, we can see a lot of these surface manifestations of plot and event, even of psychology, as manifestations of the form/swing of the play, and that in turn as a manifestation of the basic dynamic of the play-- between orderly and chaotic language, between those ancient classical themes of order and chaos.

        Supposing then we actually look at poems first on the level of the dynamic, eschewing comments about this or that word or line, this or that passage or image for a while. This moves us away from the fix-it shop mentality for poems, or where we try to bandage wounded poems-- though these localized approaches may be of some limited use on a particular poem (but just as often the comments may not be so helpful since they miss the dynamic of the poem): but in the end this band-aid approach or scalpel approach merely makes the student workshop dependent-- just as the literature student who focuses on the surface becomes teacher dependent (which may, however, be part motivated by unconscious teacher ego building). What would we do?
        Well, first, we'd try to see what forces are at work in the dynamic of the poem by examining some of the terms of the language, some of the constructs and metaphors in terms of how they relate to one another, interact--like the two types of language in Lear. Then we might look at how this pattern plays out in (okay, let's borrow Matthews term for form) the swing or form of the poem-- what patterns and shapes these forces take. At this point we might see some interesting features, some features that seem rhythmically wrong, that need rearrangement. What we actually propose for changes when we get to the surface format or construct of the poem will be informed by this larger and deeper view. That doesn't mean we won't spend time roaming the surface for various infelicities, only that attention to localized comments about a line or image will be held to a minimum. We are going to try to think Globally about the poems we look at.
        Sometimes we may start with some localized comments, but then they must be quickly rooted to what we see as the dynamic, as symptoms of it. Sometimes it will be clearer to take that approach. Ultimately, then, as a practical outcome of all this, I want us to look at each poem in this global sense-- first to try to see what sort of dynamic is at work, then how its patterns play out in form, and only then how the format/construct we see on the page works in terms of all this. Avoid picky comments about particular subjective things you think work or not.
        So, for example, if we were looking at a Shakespeare sonnet we might first try to examine some of its general principles-- say in Not marble, nor the gilded monuments... we might first notice the tension or pull between the temporal and the mortal, its parallel linguistic concerns in history (personal) vs myth, and in language vs stone. Then we might, given this opposition that is also an entangling and complimentary way of defining each term, start to see how the poem moves from its opening proposition to gradually redefine both sets of terms; then we can look at the way the sonnet form enhances this complex play of language. It does us little good to focus first on the format (14 lines rhymed a certain way) which, while skillful, doesn't help us understand the underlying structure of thinking in the poem. But looking at those oppositions we see in the form (image narrative) a movement from monuments to who places them (princes) to the idea of war to the record of events public and private: along the way we can see the monuments image metamorphose into the masonry image and then into the image of a room, while poetry gets transformed into a sense of public history. Moreover, we can see the way the poem moves in three stages then presents a summation that tries to combine the elements-- the lover will dwell in lovers eyes as a final judgment-- it is this underlying movement that is the real secret of the sonnet form, and it in turn is based upon a dynamic interrelationship.

        What does this have to do with my original experience I want to write about? someone might ask. Well, you can remember Richard Hugo's notion of the :triggering subject-- what you begin with but probably gets abandoned as the language you use reveals its secrets. Besides--"In the long run," Stevens says, "the truth does not matter." Or as Frost says in "Directive," we have to get "lost enough" to understand how complex things are; then we can "find our way." Still, as Stevens says: The real is only the base. But it is the base. And he goes on to properly confuse us: Reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor.... Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into....Every poem is a poem within a poem: the poem of the idea within the poem of the words....Poetry is the joy of language And perhaps most important: Poetry should stimulate the sense of living and of being alive. Every statement, as you can see from the above list, demands a qualification, a counter-statement. The situation is similar to what Stevens describes at the beginning of "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"--"The eye's plain version is a thing apart, / The vulgate of experience. Of this, / A few words, an and yet, and yet, and yet--" So, he says elsewhere--"The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly." Reality as craft, as fiction, then, as process of understanding. Does all this sound too poetic a description for what is real in our lives, for the sort of truth the poem should hold allegiance to? Here's a physicist's, Heisenberg's, view:

        'Reality' is what we take to be true. What we take to be
        true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our
        perceptions. What we look for depends upon what we perceive.
        What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe
        determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.

For some people this might be a horribly precarious situation; Stevens delights in such ambiguity as being itself the real. We might remember that the word "reality" is derived from the roots res (which means thing) and revi (which means to muse, think--our word reverie). Reality means what you think about--whatever it is, whatever you can think about--at least for the writer. So you start with one thing, one observation (the eye's plain version) and then gradually relate it to other things (by metaphor) and then the original plain version becomes more and more complicated-- we soon realize that the reality is far beyond us, but also inside us, in our imagination's projections.

        This how things are related is for Stevens the style. Reality is, in a sense, a style. In his essay, Two or Three ideas, Stevens writes: the style of the poem and the poem itself are one. The poet must create a style of a new bearing in a new reality. As Stevens writes in his poem, Of Modern Poetry, poetry has to find what will suffice. In the past the scene was set; it repeated what / was in the script, what was the old way of looking at things. But now, due to modern physics, the whole modernist culture, the theater was changed. Now poetry has to construct a new stage. When he talks about the audience listening to itself and not the actors what he seems to have in mind is the way the poem becomes part of a person, a reader. And yet, the actor is / a metaphysician in the dark, a poet with ideas, but ideas that are given only in his twanging a wiry string that gives / sounds passing through sudden rightness, that is, in sound, language. It is a sound that will be wholly / containing the mind and yet the poem of the act of the mind. What he is getting at here it seems is to take you through a process of thinking about the relationship between poetry and reality, the actor and the script (metaphors once removed, like poetry, from what they portray), the mind and the exterior world-- in the end none dominates, or there is what Wordsworth calls in Book XIV of the Prelude, mutual domination or what Stevens calls in Poems of Our Climate, the never-resting mind.

        The point is, this discussion of method focusing on languge is not hollow, for it is language that leads us to all we think and much of what we feel. As Kristeva points out in her book, Revolution in Poetic Language, the poem is a unique form of discourse, always subverting the accepted view of things, always proposing new and unique perceptions and visions, based on desires, hopes. A poem, as Jacques Derrida has said, deconstructs the generally accepted reality, and this is politically dangerous. A poem is, to borrow from Longinus, a transport, a metaphor that takes us to another realm, another world, with different values, visions, rules, and which is why Plato was so afraid to have the poets in his Republic. To be able to take a reader to this other realm, or to see the "real" world differently, if only slightly askew, threatens the established order because it implicitly questions it-- as leaders of totalitarian states well know, even if we hardly recognize that here in our country.

        Milosz writes: "whoever wields power is also able to control language and not only with the prohibitions of censorship but also by changing the meaning of words." It is not just subject matter, then, but the very nature of language that is the issue here. Thus Stanislaw Baranczak, another Polish poet, writes: "regardless of theme and specific address, poetry is always some kind of protest....That's why all the metaphors and rhythms-- it's just a way of putting the world's chaotic gibberish in some meaningful order and restoring the original weight to abused words. That's why all the concreteness and conciseness-- to resist the engulfing power of the world's empty abstractions and statistical generalities. That's why all the speaking in first person singular and seeing things from a strictly individual perspective -- it's poetry's way of standing up to the world whenever it tries to elbow the individual aside and of the stage." As the late Joseph Brodsky, the 1987 Nobel Prize winning Russian poet, has written: "With a poet, one's ethical posture, indeed one's very temperament, is determined by one's aesthetics." The poem itself must question its own procedures-- perhaps by shifting stylistic gears, asking questions, suggesting alternatives, changing tone or course in the middle, keeping an ironic tone, understating or overstating for effect. For the poet, the danger is still always that political and social poetry will become mere propaganda and sophistic, simplified persuasion; --playing to easy responses and catering to the 'correct' side. It is always a question of language first: even the most political of poems, if they are strong, are language driven rather than theme driven. This is a crucial notion more understood by poets than critics and teachers--language per se, even the playful attitude towards language that is at the heart of any good poem, is always a political instrument. As Jaques Derrida says: "'everyday language' is not innocent or neutral. It is the language of western metaphysics, and it carries with it not only a considerable number of presuppositions of all types, but also presuppositions inseparable from metaphysics, which, although little attended to, are knotted into a system." But this play of language is precisely what creates a world that provides alternatives to the official worlds of various political powers.
        Martin Heidegger who writes that poetry "founds the world," for "Only where there is language [poetry being the most "authentic" language] is there world, ie. the perpetually altering circuit of decision and production, of action and responsibility, but also of commotion and arbitrariness, of decay and confusion." The point is, if you turn all this workshop discussion around, you find the idea of composing, or writing your poems, not as a use of language to record an event or object or scene or feeling-- but rather an exploration of language to reveal new discoveries, what we did not know. We need to keep, as Matthews once wrote, a kind of ignorance that means a kind of wonder, what Keats called, Negative capability-- the ability to live in uncertainty and doubt without any irritable reaching after fact or reason. And after we have made initial explorations through language, then we can perhaps listen to our own language more, what it is telling us that we didn't know. What I hope will result from this way of looking at poems in workshop is a way to see how that language is actually working.
 

ATTITUDE AND TERMINOLOGY
        If we are going to have a new approach to workshop we ought to have a new terminology-- or reinvent it each time. "Art lives upon discussion," wrote Henry James, "upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints; and there is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference, though they may be times of honor, are not times of development -- are times, possibly even, of a little dullness." To a great extent, then, your progress as a writer depends upon a free testing and evaluation and presenting of your ideas. Berryman once said to a class: "No holding back. One must be ruthless with one's own writing or someone else will be." Besides, as Pliny the Younger wrote, no one accepts criticism so readily as those who best deserve praise. (Pliny was one of the first avid workshop and reading advocates, and records a lot of this in his letters.) But there's no place here for ego: Heidegger's notion of the teacher is relevant to us all: "teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than-- learning. His conduct therefore often produces the impression that we learn nothing from him, if by 'learning' we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information. The teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this alone, that he has far more to learn than they -- he has to learn to let them learn. The teacher must be capable of being more teachable than his apprentices. The teacher is far less assured of his ground than those who learn are of theirs. If the relationship between the teacher and the taught is genuine, therefore, there is never a place in it for the authority of the know-it-all or the authoritative sway of the official." That doesn't mean to pretend ignorance. Or to avaoid referring to what youve read. William Matthews, for example, would often conduct a workshop by talking not so much about the student poems in front of him but other poems, often from Horace, he could bring to bear on the student work. And the poem in fornt of us may reveal unexpected things: we often tend to wnat to chop out the weak parts, and yet they may be where the poet is straining to say something he or she has tried before and the language is straining-- in which case we may want to go after what marvin Bell calls the ghost poem behind the poem on the page, the as now impossible poem not yet there but revealed in the weaker sections. I guess the final point here is to be honest, not to coddle each other as Phil Levine warns us, but to show respect for the art and each other with our honesty and frankness. "Friends," Berryman said "it's hard work, and the hard work will test the sincerity of your desire to be poets."

ENERGIA (Language)
        Language, as we suggested above, comes first. Obviously it what a poem is made out of as opposed to music or visual representations as in art. Is the language of the poem fresh (remember Coleridge here)-- inventive metaphors and figures of speech, interesting line breaks that cause double readings of lines or emphases on unusual words, etc. (Sydney's 'energia' which he derives from Longinus' sense of the poem as creating linguistic excitement). Does it provide a sense of mystery without being just confusing (Richard Wilbur's 'genie in the bottle'). Here we might remember Charles Simic's notion: Poetry is an orphan of silence.... Occassionally people think of silence as of something negative, passive. For me, silence is spiritual energy. Language is not only what is spoken but, as one student, Karri Harrison said, what is unspoken. The unspoken is the mystery, but it is also part of the spoken in an odd sense. For her, the relationship betwen the spoken and the unspoken gives a sense of texture, like a fabric, as both a physical and sense meaning of language (see Heidegger's fourfold, below). Is the language concrete enough so that the reader can see, be interested in, and experience things in a way similar to the writer (Eliot's 'objective correlative')? Does it have a solid connection to the language of its time, as Wordsworth suggested. Does it need to be roughed up? smoothed out?
        "Make the language take really desperate leaps," Roethke once wrote. Are there cliches in the poem that need to be pruned, flat language (cliches are hard to spot in our own work-- but if anyone else has heard a figure before, it probably is a cliche-- beware). Poetry is the song of a new sky, suggests the Indian/Pakastani poet, Faiz, emphasizing the notion of freshness that poets from Chaucer to Levertov talk about in English. Does the story line (if there is one directly) take over and wash out the language so that we have mostly a plot summary-- the effect being to have the poem's effects based on what is external to the poem's language (the poem's art)? There are only a few story lines, subjects, and they are dull, says Bill Matthews: what makes them interesting/compelling is an engagement with the language. Language is everything. Even Breton, writing the Surrealist manifesto (many people thought the surrealists had no social conscience), contends that changing the language is changing people's thinking, changing vision: it is "revolution." This is a statement echoed in our own day by Czeslaw Milosz, Seifert, Kundera, Herbert, Symborska, and a number of other eastern european poets and writers.
        The Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, has said: "The language that nourishes the poem is, after all, nothing but history, name of this or that, reference and meaning....Without history -- without men, who are the origin, the substance and end of history -- the poem could not be born or incarnated, and without the poem there could be no history either, because there would be no origin or beginning." And the philosopher Heidegger writes: "Only where there is language is there world, ie, the perpetually altering circuit of decision and production, of action and responsibility, but also of commotion and arvbitrainess, of decay and confusion." In other words, language is what moves us from a placid and generalized view of the world, the world of the "reductive" as Milan Kundera, the exiled Czech novelist calls it, to a world of complex, variable, interesting responses, that is, to the human. In talking about the rhythm of language, Robert Hass has written : "Because rhythm has direct access to the unconscious, because it can hypnotize us, enter our bodies and make us move, it is power. And power is political. That is why rhythm is always revolutionary ground. It is always the place where the organic rises to abolish the mechanical and where energy announces the abolition of tradition. New rhythms are new perceptions." Now Hass is not advocating throwing away the cannon of western poetry, only that we energize it, make it our own, bring something fresh to it.
        It is worth pausing here for a moment. In "Of Modern Poetry" Stevens writes that poetry today has to "construct a new stage," but it is, nonetheless a stage, a recognizable shape and form, a traditional thing. And WC Williams talks about the poem as a "Field of Action" referring to field thoery in physics to emphasize the more relative, less static way he would like to think about form and the tradition. For that matter, remember that Eliot's point in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is that the poet remakes his or her tradition. It is also worth noting that most of the better poets of our own time have a thorough grounding in the tradition, as we can see by Wright's and Matthews knowledge of and references to Horace, Kinnell's translation of the troubadour poet Villon, Bishop's translations from Spanish and French, Berryman's work in Shakespeare and adaptation of that language in The Dream Songs, Ferlinghetti and Merwin's grounding in Romance languages and literatures, Duncan's "Poem beginning with a Line By Pindar," H.D's use of classical myth to structure her poems, -- the list could go on. Each of these poets, and dozens of others among those that will be remembered, have, in Auden's phrase, "remade the language." The key, then, is newness, freshness: as T.S. Eliot said, there is always the communication of some new experience, or some fresh understanding of the familiar, or the expression of something we have experienced but have no words for.

DRAMATICS

-in the language
        The energy in a poem and its sense of transport (see below) assumes a tension between poles-- beginning and end, say, or figure of speech and its referent, according to Longinus. For Longinus, as for most of the ancients and up to the present time, the poem is based on counterpointing. Even a brief lyric, as Stanley Kunitz suggests, fights with time. Take this example: "How much I love you" is not so interesting-- it's a plain statement. If the title of the poem is "Before The Execution," now we have a sense of urgency, tension-- even the briefest lyric, of a moment, counterpoints itself against something beyond that moment. (Lyric comes from "lyre" often, in the Greek, a single stringed instrument whose variant music comes from fretting: that is, several sounds from one string, several more from each stroke of the strings --) That provides its dramatic power. "In a poem the sentences talk to each other like characters in a play," wrote Frost in a letter. Even Johnson, talking about Donne and the metaphysical poets, approved of "disparate" elements "joined together" in a poem, though he disapproved of the "violence" by which he saw them doing it. But the basic idea of counterpointing and tension is there; as Dante wrote in his "Epistola" to Can Grande della Scala, "the subject round which the alternative senses play must be twofold." or as Coleridge said of Donne, he wreathes iron pokers into true love knots.
        This is what Wordsworth and Blake and Keats, etc are talking about when they talk about the moment of vision: a particular instant is expanded and thus made complex by its counterpointed relationship to all beyond its original structure. This is true even if the poem, especially a lyric, is about an instantaneous sensation, as Charles Simic puts it so well: we experience the poem in language, and unless you can say all the words simultaneously it takes place over time in a linear structure. In other words, even a brief lyric is not about a moment; it is about the several moments it takes to talk about the moment, and that in itself is a source of counterpointing.

-in the dramatic staging
        Dramatics also has to do with staging: would the love poem work in the bedroom , asks Gerald Stern. Where would one speak this. Machado says: "In order to write the poem, you must first invent the poet who will write it." And Rimbaud: "I is another." What these writers are talking about is a tension between the speaker and the author, the speaker and what is said, the speaker and the addressee, and in many cases there will be several of thse dramatic tensions of staging-- and always at least one. In other words, a poem is not spoken in a vacuum: a poem is 'a person speaking to people,' to paraphrase Wordsworth. When we talk to others (we might pretend to talk to ourselves, but then there's no need to speak aloud-- or share the poem--) there is always a motive: to convince. Poetry comes from one of the two branches of rhetoric according to Aristotle, persuasion (based on passion), the other being argument (based on logic).
        So the speaker is by nature counterpointed against the other, as Heather McHugh contends in an interview. It is against the other that we measure ourselves. The special case of this, of course, is the dramatic monologue, or even the interior monologue-- even just poems meant to be overheard. In a sense the other gives us a built in editor as writers: we know who we would say something to, where, even perhaps when, and certainly, in drafting, what order. Consciousness of an other can then be a help in writing and reading a poem.
TRANSPORT (metaphor, metaphorika)
        Poems involve, wrote Goethe, and "adjustment of passion." In other words they change us, they bring us to new passions. So, we might ask, does the poem transport us to a different dimension (emotional, intellectual, or both) at the end of the poem than what we were in at the beginning? Does each line or phrase add something new-- not just a new thing or image, but a new feeling or attitude. Can you follow a clear progression of effects through the poem that seem to lead to some purpose? Does each part add something new emotionally-- not just a new image or object, but what they do is important. Longinus says the basis of all poetry is metaphor, a word that comes from the Greek to mean a means of transportation. That is, poetry is transport. It takes us someplace as writers and readers. It is an act of discovery. And when we get to the end of the journey, as Maxine Kumin suggests, we are suddenly struck by its uniqueness (she cites Donne's phrase, "the shutting up.") It's as if the poem slams us into a wall, or drops us quietly off a cliff.
        On the level of the image: Do the images resonate with a sense of meaning and references beyond themselves as Simic insists, citing Heidegger who steals this from Plato (see below). In Jean Valentine's terms we must "hallow the everyday," or as Carol Muske says, "step into the sky" though our images. If the poem hasn't transported us we haven't "discovered" anything (Longinus again). The transport can be, but doesn't at all have to be, something of a transcendental experience. Yes, some poems do this.
        But at the other extreme take the case of our little lyric "Before The Execution." The title and the poem's one line moves us from a sense of despondency to triumph through love over death. Or take WC Williams poem always mistitled "The Red Wheelbarrow" (it has no title and only a section number in its original placement in Spring and All, a book about odd perceptions and how they change our thinking). The poem is carefully set up with syllable and meter counts to suggest a window structure, there is even a progression of long to short versions of the vowels in most stanzas-- but it says the stable thing (wheelbarrow) is next to the chickens (moving). This is not the way we logically see things in English: we usually see the moving next to the stable, the small next to the large, the minor next to the major. So the poem forces us to resee the world by reseeing the very basis of our vision in simple physical detail.
        I want to extend this idea for a moment. In this poem it's like saying the sun is next to the earth-- it's looking through the other end of the telesecope. Only a minor difference in perception, yet as he begins the poem, "So much depends / upon" this. On a larger extended scale, it makes a difference whether we see Hitler as a product of the horror of his times or as a creater of its horrors. This is the sort of extension that Kundera and Milosz talk about when they discuss the implications of such minor differences for larger political and ethical visions. As Van Gogh wrote in a journal: "It is not enough to have a certain cleverness. It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper understanding. If we study Japanese art, we see an artist who is wise, philosophic, and intelligent, who spends his time -- how? he studies a single blade of grass. But this blade of grass leads him to draw the plant, and then the seasons, the wide aspects of the countryside, the animals, then the human figures." The littlest things make the biggest differences.
IMAGE NARRATIVE
        The images in a poem can be visual, sound, synesthetic, and a variety of other things. They are, as Charles Simic has written, the starting point. He suggests that all young poets read Heidegger's Poetry Language Thought. he suggests as especially important the emphasis on the fourfold of the image: earth (the physical feel of the image), sky (its place in time, the seasons), heavens (its relation to the cosmos), man (its relation to history). So the image of a pencil may reveal that odd smell espcially after it is sharpened, how the pencil came from a tree and what it will end us as, how wood and trees fit into the order of things, and how people can use the pencil as weapon or communication device, for example. Now you can't do this with every image, but there ought to be some such sense of resonance of a context beyond the physical. They have a metaphoric quality.
        Almost anything can be a metaphor. Pope uses names as metaphors to conjure up character types. Milosz and Holub in our own age and Marvel in the renaissance, to name just a few, sometimes use places and historical events as metaphors and images. The thing is, they make a consistent story of their connotations, or if the consistency is interrupted then there is a reason: perhaps a change in tone, point of view, etc. Are the images, then, related as unit in themselves, giving the poem some artistic coherence? Do the metaphors change and transform themselves, echo back and forth, alter associations-- that is, is the poem actively interrogating its own issues? Pavese describes the image narrative as a story made up of the set of connotations the images have: they all link together to form another story beneath the surface narrative. A poet like Ashbery seems very difficult to read if you have been reading poems as prose-- but if you have been following the image narrative in poems you know that all Ashbery is doing is dispensing with the surface narrative and going directly to the image narrative. Some poets like Bishop and Jarrell add tension in this way: making the surface and the images underneath conflict with one another (though keeping each consistent).
        To get a good sense of this you might look at Dryden's "Of Dramatic Poesy" where he discusses so many underlying elements besides plot that move a poem along, and look at King Lear and its reliance upon the dramatic movement of the images that seem, in many ways, to determine the action of the play. And then at some of the deep image poets like W.S. Merwin, or an earlier poet like Keats, or Catullus' longer poems where the play of myths and mythic images create the point of the poem by counterpointing value systems. You might ask: what is the emotional center of the poem. How is the poem organized around that? and how does that emotion change or get affected by other things around it. How does the poem move away from that center? Keats, for example, always talked about the ladder of intensity that a poem ought to climb. Of course, in an ironic poem, you might be stepping down a few rungs. But the point is, you aren't frozen there on the ladder. When things keep moving, discovery abounds, that is, imagination is at work: we are in the presence of poetry. We write to discover, explore the world around us, to be more observant of it, to change or at least clarify our visions.

FORM/FORMAT
        The classic definition is that a sonnet has 14 lines of imabic pentameter rhymed a certain way depending upon whether it is Shakespearean (several types), Miltonic, Petrachan, Keatsian, Frostian, Wordsworthian, or even the unrhymed sonnets of Lowell-- which is to say that the surface defintion (format) tells us less than what is happening underneath (form). For example, a Shakespearan sonnet often has a quartrain with an image that is modified in the next quartrain, then again in the third, and in the final couplet the whole movement is summed up or takes off in a totally different, ironic direction. A Petrarchan moves in a more cause/effect, before after, now/then-- that is, argumentative--way. Form is a question of pacing and timing-- of organizing these rhythmic principles. It can also relate to the organization of vowel sounds and consonant sounds. "Poetry begins with the beating of a drum," wrote Delamore Schwartz. But we shouldn't write in the language of the metronome, writes Pound. In other words-- irregularity is part of music and form. "Speed," Berryman would always call for-- "speed is power." Keep the poem moving.
        Wierd things happen in English. Milton's supposed blank verse reads to many poets I know like (Anglo saxon basis here) 4 beat lines, in some places even like free verse. What's happening is that rhyme and meter are not natural to English (they were adopted by the French conquerers after 1066 when English was devalued); they are natural to romance languages. That is why there is all that debate in the renaissance between Daniel and Campion, why Wyatt and Surrey sound so different, why Sydney and so many others joined the arguments. It was and is a hot issue. What is natural to English is accentual verse, the beat of Old English, and the backbeat of most blank verse poems in English-- and why Milton sounds more like the Beowulf poet than Dante.
        So, it is more useful to you as a writer to talk about the ghost form or form (underlying movement) as opposed to format (received form); though many academic critics would berate you,. most poets through the ages would agree with you (even the ancients compared form to a "body" which is where someone like Denise Levertov gets her notion of "organic form" (she also borrows this from Coleridge who borrowed it from Schiller who goes back to an analogy by Plato in the Phaedrus who... well, you get the point). This is why it is so important to have a grounding in the tradition-- so you can see, as Levertov suggests among others, how to borrow and steal from it, how to adapt it to your own time by adapting the forms (more than the formats). Form and format, then.
        Actually, this confusion accounts for the unusual strength and influence of English poetry. Like the poetries of the troubadours in the late dark ages/early renaissance (they were struggling against Latin received forms from Roman poets), like the poetries of Rome (Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, et al were struggling against the received forms of the Greeks), English poetry is in a position to pit one tradition against another. That's why freshness and newness become such a hallmark (within the tradition-- remember Pound's dictum: "Make it [the tradition] new) in English-- we have so many new hybrid forms-- Wordsworth and Coleridge's lyrical ballads, the meditative lyric, etc. The thing is that we don't just imitate slavishly, we add-- that is, we use our imaginations with the help of a natiive language tradition already pitted against a romance language tradition. That's why we have Milton, Wordsworth, and Pound, say, reinventing epic. Our sense of form in English has always been more fluid than to think merely of format-- at least among the better, stronger poets.
        In sum, when we talk about structure, perhaps we should be focusing on form more than format. I know a few traditionalists who misinterpret the vibrancy of the tradition and suggest we look at the type of poem first, then see if it follows a ceratin formula for that type of poem-- better to see where it breaks the tradition and adds somethinmg new. Otherwise, neither you nor the poetry will ever progress.

WHAT'S AT STAKE?
        Joseph Brodsky writes: "With a poet, one's ethical posture, indeed one's very temperment, is determined by one's aesthetics." Why is the poem being spoken? To whom? What effect is it supposed to have? How is the audience taken into account if we are, as Wordsworth said, speaking to others in poems. "Arts unites people," wrote Tolstoy. If it is about a seemingly trivial subject, does it relate to some larger context? What stake does the speaker have in all this? "Poetry must convince by a fine excess," wrote Keats. "Would you want to live inside your own poem?" asks Marvin Bell: "Would you want your poems to be written by you?" Do you want to be you? one might also ask, but that too is a question our poems almost always explore. "I have been all the pronouns," Simic once said in an interview, suggesting something of the complexity of how the self is constructed and viewed in poetry.
        Complexity is a tricky thing in poetry-- it does not mean enormous amounts of book learning. Maybe Pound stated it best in his essay "How To Read." There are, he says, three levels of writing. The first is melopoeia, how the words get charged with a musical effect, something someone who doesn't even know the language can hear. But poetry is more than that, he says, it is also phanopoeia, how the words that comprise the music also are images that suggest visual things (the analogy so far, then, is to music and poetry). The final and most important thing about poetry is logopoeia, "the dance of intellect among words." Dance suggests the rhythm, the music on a larger scale than just mere sounds, and the intellect suggests that the images relate to larger contexts. Logopoeia has to do with the image narrative, with transport, with energy of language: it suggets an investment of the poet's whole being in the poem, especially since intellect as he uses it in the context of the Greek definitions includes emotion-- it means something like consciousness, awareness. What is at stake, then, is one's whole being.
        A poem, involves then, a certain complexity, a certain richness. It tries to include, as Whitman suggested, as much of the world as it can, no matter how contradictory the parts are. This sense of inclusiveness does not mean surface complication. Even our brief lyric "Before the Execution" suggests a stirring and ambivalence of emotion, a complexity of feeling. The desire for simplicity is a desire for reductiveness which is, as Kundera says, the evil of our time, a reductiveness of thinking that leads to elections by slogans, an ignorance that allows whole populations to be duped by the latest "-ism" that comes along. Poetry and art teach us to respect and honor the complexity of our lives. It was Dryden who wrote: "If then the parts are managed so regularly, that the beauty of the whole be kept entire, and that the variety become not a perplexed and confused mass of accidents, you will find it infinitely pleasing to be led in a labyrinth of design, where you see some of your way before you, yet discern not the end till you arrive at it." This summarizes much that we have been discussion: freshness, structure, complexity, and transport. Complexity means that we shouldn't expect a poem to have just one perspective or emotion: there may be an ironic undercutting, a collision of views, a conflict between conscious and unconscious desires. Complexity means there is much at stake: the truth of our lives as human beings.
        Perhaps Keats said is best. The poet must possess negative capability -- the ability to live in uncertainty and doubt without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. The poet has to live with complexity, confusion-- and yet not write confusing poems. The poem is not the place to find answers, but to ask questions. In this way it will be closest to our lives. Buried here is a sense of self irony. What's at stake suggests the big themes. One big theme is the sense of the political and social realm we live in. A poem has to reflect that-- in all its complexity, and it can do so by the direct reference of political poetry, by using the images and language of our time, the objects and culture of our time, the visions and hopes and stupidities of our time.
        That raises, for a moment, the idea of political poetry. If it is going to remain realistic it should reflect the complexity of the speaker, and not reveal a speaker as a mouthpiece for one side or another. Too often political poetry does this. But here are two rules for the speakers of such poems: first, we should have a sense that the speaker would gladly give up the poem to change the situation (that he or she does not luxuriate in other people's pain), and second, that there is a sense that, given a twist of fate, any one of us has the capability of being a monster. This applies to any poetry that classifies itself by theme-- abuse poems, feminist protest poems, racial or ethnic protestations. this is not to say that the poem shouldn't offer judgements, only that the speaker shouldn't pretend to be God in doing so.
        Nabokov describes how, seeing suddenly the boat that would take him to America, hidden, as it were, among but behind the chimneys of the city as in one of those pictures where you have to find the hidden object, he was suddenly filled with surprise, discovery, the sense of transport, of where he would be taken. At the same time there was a nostalgia for what he was leaving, and a sense of anxiety for what awaited him-- a scrambled picture - ÔFind What The Sailor Has Hidden- that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen. The emotions of poetry are complex, even contradictory, but they are held together in an order we can make sense of and thus deal with. We might, finally, remember this quote from Pliny the Younger: "Literature is both my joy and my comfort: it can add to every happiness and there is no sorrow it cannot console. So worried as I am by my wife's illness, and the sickness of my household and death of some of my servants, I have taken refuge in my work, the only distraction I have in my misery. It may make me more conscious of my troubles, but it helps me to bear them with patience."