Had our first full class meeting today, and already I can tell I have many things to learn from Doug Powell. He's a neat teacher, and he seems to have read just about everything there is to read. He also goes off on tangents a lot, which might drive some people crazy but feels very natural to me anyway. Let's see -- we talked about reading one's poems aloud in the bathroom in order to revise (which somehow led to the virtues of irritable bowel syndrome...), and about the use of fart-sounding devices in poetry workshops, and ... oh yeah, other stuff too. Hee. Many more details later, I'm sure.
Fellow blogger Carol Peters is in the workshop with me. So the class is 1/3 bloggers. Oh my.
The rest as a quick list:
- I am pitifully un-well-read. This may or may not be remediable.
- Today is one of those days when everything I have ever written is crap.
- The above can, however, be a useful feeling if you use it to spur yourself to write something better and prove that you can write non-crap. It may also be a useful state of mind from which to work on revision, so.
- One of our assignments so far: find a bang-up ending from one of your poems -- you know, one of those endings where it just feels like an ending, bang pow, the big finish -- and start writing from those lines. This assignment made me immediately very excited, though I haven't started on it yet and now I'm tired.
- I have never been this quiet and shy in a workshop before. What gives? Possibly related to points #1 and #2 above. Is there a name for it where you know you're not really out of your depth but you feel as though you are?
- I would give a lot to be able to bottle the air here and bring it home with me. Harbor breezes, harbor breezes, harbor breezes. Oh lovely.
- It is only Monday and already I feel as though I'm running out of time.
4 comments:
Anne: It sounds wonderful. Tell DA Powell I *heart* him.
Please keep these notes coming! It's the second best thing to being there. Thanks for posting them.
Your picture are *gorgeous*. Oh, do I hope I can do Provincetown next year. I did the opposite once: turned what had been a poem's beginning for years (the poem never took off from that platform) into an ending, and voila! It works both ways.
And dear, no matter how much we read, somehow we are never well-read.
Thank you for the great photos, and for sharing your experience with us!
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