The ornery fiction writer Charles Newman said to me at the end of the last century: “The workshop represents everything wrong with the 20th century!”
Gerald Stern went further:
Still, the workshop represents an essential way to get feedback on poems from like-minded, simpatico peers. On the other hand, so many people have crappy workshop experiences, because readers of poetry fall into two broad groups:
People who know what they’re talking about.
People who don’t know what they’re talking about.
Furthermore, knowing how to write poems doesn’t mean that someone knows how to teach how to write poems. Often the technical part of making a poem can be taught, but how to find the poem is another matter.
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