The Poet Laureate at Work

So it turns out that the new poet laureate (see earlier post below) not only hates workshops, creative writing classes, and many poets)... she's also pretty hilarious.

She falls into the "writing as a solitary act" school of thought, which has been a point of discussion in (cough, shame) my writing group. Let's imagine what happens when said solitary writer goes to AWP, the nation's largest writing conference. What fun ensues!

Check out her 2005 essay in Poetry, "I Go to AWP," in which she compares writers in groups to spawn of the devil. An excerpt on workshops:

"Workshop. In the old days before creative writing programs, a workshop was a place, often a basement, where you sawed or hammered, drilled or planed something. You could not simply workshop something. Now you can. You can take something you wrote by yourself to a group and get it workshopped. Sometimes it probably is a lot like getting it hammered. Other writers read your work, give their reactions, and make suggestions for change. A writer might bring a piece back for more workshopping later, even. I have to assume that the writer respects these other writers’ opinions, and that just scares the daylights out of me. It doesn’t matter if their opinions really are respectable; I just think the writer has given up way too much inside. Let’s not share. Really. Go off in your own direction way too far, get lost, test the metal of your work in your own acids. These are experiments you can perform down in that old kind of workshop, where Dad used to hide out from too many other people’s claims on him."