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  • Risk and the SublimePushing the Personal Limit at the 2012 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop
  • Vievee Francis (bio)

In the well of my throat everything I wanted to say was dangerous.

James Allen Hall

I don’t trust beauty anymore.

Reginald Shepherd

I surprised myself during this summer’s 2012 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop at Brown University. It is not unusual for a workshop participant, while in the throes of critique and study, to find themselves in tears. Sometimes it is simply because some craft point, in terms of their work, has finally been understood. Sometimes the work of another participant touches them in an unexpected way at an unexpected moment. Good. Empathy. Sometimes frustration can overtake the senses. Sometimes it is the realization that one may be quite talented, but inspiration alone will not be enough. And sometimes it is the necessary realization that poetry is more than an exercise of cultural agreements, more than the easy comfort of “it came to me like this and here it is,” more than writing for the uplift of a community, but an interrogation beyond received forms into a questioning of received beliefs.

For many years I have privately taught individuals within my home community what I consider to be poetry basics. Foundational knowledge. But that alone is enough to open the flood gates, taking raw talent and providing just enough structure for it to move from the poet being inspired, to the capacity to inspire the reader. For years I would not admit how much a student could be affected by such tutelage. This was not until my partner, also a poet, forced the point, saying, “Don’t tell the students study won’t change them, it will.” I wanted to convince my students that they would not lose their voices, and indeed they did not. Most had not developed enough of a voice to claim one, some had no idea where their voice began and others ended, and the rest had voices that were identifiable but only vaguely, not yet honed. So “voices” were developed, but the poets themselves were changed, just as the writing and steady study of poetics has changed me. How could it be otherwise?

There is no field poetics doesn’t encompass. There is no realm we do not explore. As such, we will eventually find ourselves on the frontiers of our own belief systems. Ultimately, [End Page 868] during any strong workshop that privileges the poet’s individual growth as well as the field of poetry, the poet will begin to write not with their own motivations alone in mind, but with the needs of the poem in mind. The student will let go of preconceived notions, let go of hubris, of the uncritical commitment to personal mythologies (taken in like religion), of poetry built over years of earnest but naive secondary and high school instruction by well-meaning teachers, but teachers who do not themselves write poetry, or who have not read any contemporary poetry, relegating what is vital and vibrant to some far future where it will have grown either dim or canonically inert.

Consider Gabby Douglass. In her interviews after winning the gold medal and the Gymnastics All Around title, she smiled, but it was through a copious amount of tears, and she made no attempt to in any way hide the measure of what it took for her to get there. And the words she kept coming back to were discipline and practice. One of the worst collective cultural mythologies of poetry is that the writing of poetry takes no practice. That the poem as inspired comes out close to done. Even poets who have done workshops, completed MFA’s, taken on professorships etc. can find themselves believing this, as such resisting or resenting the necessary work the field does indeed demand. This is not to dismiss the danger of editing the work into irrelevance, but I am speaking more to those who would say, “This is hard” as if that had come as a revelation to them. And to many, it has. Just how hard is it? It can bring us to our knees. It can...

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