Tuesday, October 6, 2009

The Checklist and Poetry Forms

I agree about the workshopping checklist. It seems to me that it doesn't give enough attention to convention like the level of seriousness or playfulness in each poem. I feel like Dylan's list of possible questions are very appropriate for evaluation...they should be more open-ended, so that they fit each poem, instead of forcing us to categorize the poems, which might not fit the current questions as well. Even a simple question like:
"What really confuses me in this poem?" gets straight to what aspects the writer can improve on, instead of re-establishing things that are already clear. That said, I understand the intention of list. Maybe we should all collaborate on one that we feel better addresses any general poem.
I've mentioned this previously, but I am very interested in learning the specific structures of forms like sonnets, etc. I don't trust to teach myself those forms, because even knowing the definition and conventions of a form won't necessarily allow me to do it well. I feel like maybe some in-class drills would be really helpful in that regard; we could learn methods for creating the skeleton of poems, and not just methods for creating interesting content. Rhyme's Reason is definitely useful and interesting, but I would be more comfortable if we had some in-class practice of the different styles we've read in Rhyme's Reason.

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