[New-Poetry] Poetic dialogue? To criticize or not.

[Anny Ballardini]

I casually opened The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo round page 60 (book I received today), title of the chapter: In Defense of Creative Writing Classes.

... I think Yeats was right when he observed that what comes easy for the bad poet comes with great difficulty for the good. We accept those who, in our opinion, seem to be the best writers. But we may be accepting those who have absorbed technique rapidly because no obsessions normal to the good writer were there to get in the way. In forty years a celebrated poet may turn out to be someone who was rejected by graduate writing programs. ... 

... If we are doing our job, creative-writing teachers are performing a necessary negative function. And if we are good teachers, we should be teaching the writer ways of doing that for himself all his writing life. We teach how not to write and we teach writers to teach themselves how not to write. When we teach how to write, the student had best be on guard.

What about a student who is not good? Who will never write much? It is possible for a good teacher to get from that student one poem or one story that far exceeds whatever hopes the student had. It may be of no importance to the world of high culture, but it may be very important to the student. It is a small thing, but it is also small and wrong to forget or ignore lives that can use a single microscopic moment of personal triumph. ...

...

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20061229/85a6ea6c/attachment.html