Changing the Face of Workshops
the academic deconstruction stuff at the door. Encourage personal reflection-- as in, "hearing that I am reminded of..." or "I felt (insert emotional response here) as I listened to that..." etc. Ask people to give positive feedback and to try and keep in mind that there is plenty of positive feedback in this world for all of us! Just because the poet on your left gets positive feedback, that doesn't mean there won't be any left when they get around to you-- there's plenty!
As a facilitator, offer exercise options that will help people break out of cliché or rhyming poetry patterns that new writers may assume to be "necessary" to "real" poetry. When you offer the exercises, offer examples of poetry that are derived from the exercise so writers can see what it might look like. This way of modeling other options is so very much healthier than looking at someone's writing and telling them all the things you think are "wrong" with it!
These are just a few of the basic ways that we can begin to show that poetry is an abundant form of healing art rather than a scarcity and fear based business that some traditional institutions would have the world believe it is. Explore your options, listen to everyone's ideas, try new things, stop going to those academic/traditional conferences and workshops, talk to the coordinators at those places and tell them you want to see poetry therapy concepts applied to the next conference or you won't be there. When people tell you that "academic" poetry and "therapy" poetry are two very different things, tell them that the walls of separation they see are illusions. They'll look at you funny and not understand what you mean, but say it anyway!
It is up to each of us individually to make collective changes to the poetry world so that it can be an abundant and healing art rather than a destructive competition.
Finally, I am sure that someone will come around from some academic setting somewhere, read this article, promptly deconstruct it, and thereby prove how wrong I am or how faulty my premise or how my topics clash like a comparison of apples and oranges. And that's just fine with me. But
Latest Articles