I'm an amateur poet. Have written probably a total of 100 good poems in my life that still would not make it to any of the major national poetry magazines. (Not that I haven't tried, trust me...)
However, I was very honored about six months to get accepted to a poetry writing Master Class conducted by a bona fide and famous poet who heads the creative writing program in a major university in my area.
This is a man whose poems I've admired greatly and have just finished a collection of his recently published works.
My first reaction to the news was to call back my writer's center and make sure that it wasn't a joke or anything.
No, it was true. I was indeed accepted to the Master Class of only 12 budding poets and the selection was made on the basis of our sample poems by none other than The Master himself.
Wow! I was floored. What an honor. What a delight.
But the next emotion was one of absolute dread and fear!
It was one thing reading my poems to my wife and loved ones.
But it would be a whole another kind of experience to expose them to the eagle-like scrutiny of a nationally renown poet and actually a "hero" of mine.
Jeeez, what the heck was I getting myself into?!
Once the workshop got underway I was really amazed at the quality of writing in that small group of ours.
We were all unknown poets, some of us, like me, never even published. But those lines, absolutely haunting, winding, exquisite lines, reminded me once again why I loved poetry so much in the first place.
However, although we were all evidently qualified in linguistic pyrotechnics, that meant nothing for our Master. It didn't mean anything for him at all.
He was after something else, something more than just a flash in the pan. Hmmm, I was getting curious about that...
At that point I started to talk less and listen more, my ears wide open like radio-astronomy dishes scanning the heavens.
I've soon realized the crucial ingredient that was lacking in my poems and what made HIS poems that hard-hitting, that breath taking.
It was a simple word that I had not thought about within the context of poetry until that time - HONESTY.
Let me explain.
We were all both stepping on the gas and the brakes at the same time.
We were all trying to say something very dear and important to us by choosing poetry as a platform.
Yet when we reached the end of the road, we were all refusing to let it go, flap our wings and fly off the precipice of our daily over-structured mental landscape.
There was a lot of resistance in each of us to tell the truth and nothing else but the whole truth. Instead, we were falling back on the easy defense mechanisms of linguistic acrobatics and clever phrases and metaphors. Obviously to be clever and tricky was not what poetry was all about.
HONESTY is one word that I've left that workshop with and I'll be forever grateful to him for showing me the source problem with every bad poem.
Whether I'll have the courage or not to write poems in the future that will honor that crucial principle is something else.
But at least now I know what to do to write poems that reveal not only my own small personal facts (who cares?) but great universal truths as well (what a service to humanity!).
I survived the quake of the Master Class and now I don't have any excuses to write bad poems any more.
Is that why I haven't written any poems at all since that date?
No comments:
Post a Comment