Since April finds me exhausted, sick, and busy thus far, I'm taking the month off from a formal assignment. No worries...I'll still produce a piece. I'm just not going to hold myself strictly to a form or assignment. So, I guess the assignment is to write whatever you want.

I recently received a comment on this site that I decided warranted an entire post. Below, you can read the original comment from reader Cathy:

"Well, well, well...I have finally signed myself up for a creative writing class [...], and I was super-excited about it, until yesterday: bad workshop. And I don't say that because no one seemed to like my poem and I am an over-sensitive pansy, but because I really felt like something else was happening. I suddenly felt old and out of shape (perhaps because I am the only grad student in the bunch). I became very aware that these students have been in classes and workshops before, and that there are some "rules" of the writing prcess that have been drilled into them that I heard again and again that made little sense to me (eg- "Don't end-stop your stanzas. It's ruining the poem").

"I am by no means claiming that I know more than these students, and I am the first to admit that I have been out of the workshop scene for two years now. But I also want to point out that since being out of the workshop loop, I feel I've had more success as a "poet" than ever before.

"So I guess my point is that although workshops are helpful, sometimes you can learn more about your own poetics and your own poetic process by simply doing and writing...

or maybe I am just trying to make myself feel better."

Thanks, Cathy, for sharing your thoughts.

Oh the workshop. A glorious place for exapnding one's ideas of what a poem should be, but Cathy has pointed out a major flaw in the entire process: the fact that its paticipants have all somehow already come to a group comclusion about what is acceptable in a poem and what is not. Though it's expected that individual opinions will be voiced in workshop discussions, there is a certain aesthetic that seems to be already agreed-upon by many of the participants. Whether it be the avoidance of end-stopping stanzas, the use of rhyme or punctuation, or the adherence to systematic line lengths and structures, it seems that any formalized workshop has an unwritten set of rules that everyone seems to understand result in a good poem.

What is unclear about this phemonmenon is how these criteria are determined. Perhaps it is the subject of the workshop: for example, a workshop course on form would certainly ahere to the rules that dictate poetic forms, and your readers would most likely read your poems with this in mind. Sometimes its simply personal aesthetic: each individual has a different opinion on how to construct a poem. Perhaps ome indidivual is more vocal than others in expressing how they believe a poem should be constructed and thus a style is agreed upon.

What I believe happens more often than not is that impressionable young writers who are learning how to craft poems look to their leaders to show them what is good, and then they cling to these rules as if they are the gospel truth of poetry-writing. I mean, if your professor (who is probably published AND grading you) or a visiting poet (who your professors all build up into greatness) say that doing away with punctuation is a really good idea for all your poetry, it's something you're likely to do...or at least dabble in.

I'm not saying that it's wrong to take someone else's ideas about writing and incorporate them in your work. But, to simply adopt a practice and not see how it organically functions, changes, and flows with your own methods and writing is a bad idea. And to force that on others is too.

But then again, how do you prevent this groupthink problem in a workshop? Is it possible? With young writers, I think it's difficult. Especially if you have instructors who do enjoy an ego trip from dictating the rules of writing to these impressionable students. And every workshop will be different and have different rules based on the instructor's preferences (which is what Cathy seems to be running into).

This seems like a great opportunity for meaningful discussion on the workshop in general, so please feel free to chime in. Why are these unwritten rules present in workshops? Is this a symptom of university-centered writing groups or all groups? Is the workshop an effective tool for producing, critiquing, and revising poetry, or is it simply an assembly-line process that homogenizes work?