The Beauty of Poetry Workshops

Poetry is one of the wildest, most surprising, inspirational, life-consuming, and life-changing things I’ve ever hitched my wagon to. Every time I think I’m going to take a break from it to focus on other writing, poetry re-enters my life in a new, unexpected way that pulls me back in. And I can’t say I’m sorry about that, not one bit.

Last year, right about this time, I joined a poetry group called WyoPoets, the Wyoming State poetry society. They were having a workshop in the town where I live and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to attend. I wrote about some of the things I discovered in that workshop in the post Art vs. Craft. This year, I renewed my membership and attended their workshop in Casper.

This year’s presenter was poet Connie Wanek, who has an impressive (staggering even) list of awards she’s received over the years. The things I will remember most about her though include her kindness, the encouragement she offered poets, and her humor.

I’ve been involved in a number of workshops before, and probably my least favorite task is being asked to write from a prompt where we have to write in the moment. I know many people love that and I can see its value in demonstrating a concept, but it’s uncomfortable for me. I like to be a little more contemplative or inspired to write when an idea strikes. So, the fact that Wanek didn’t require us to write to a prompt was of great relief to me.

Instead, we had group discussions on how to turn an idea of a personal, pungent story we wanted to tell into a poem and whether or not there was any such thing as a bad poem, what constitutes a bad poem, and how it could be reshaped into something we liked.

Luckily, there were many brave souls who willingly brought story ideas they’d struggled expressing in a poem, and some of their own poems they didn’t like and wondered if there was a way to salvage.

Instead of being at a conference where you sit and listen to a presenter (which in all honesty I love those too) it was like being part of a giant writing group, where we shared suggestions and ideas on how the poems might be molded. And tackling problems like this in a practical way as a group felt inspiring. I often find that it’s easiest to learn how to fix problems or address issues in someone else’s work when there’s that distance. I can then use those same principles in my own work.

Here are a few of the other inspiring or interesting points Wanek made during the workshop:

• Poetry tries to make sense of our lives through words. You don’t even hardly know what you’re saying sometimes.
• Poetry is a big house with room for all sorts of poems, just as music is a big house with many genres.
• Writing — there is no right or wrong, there’s just more or less effective.
• A great poem has to be better than having no mistakes.
• Bad writing has no surprises, includes clichés, we’ve heard it all before, and it offers nothing new.
• Regarding rhyming poems: There’s a problem if you really have to torque the sentence to make a rhyme.
• Poetry has to do with the love of language and the power it has in your life.