Swans are ghosts on jade black water

I’m handing in 25 poems tonight for workshop. Because I’m so intimate with them (and have gotten so little feedback), I have no clue how they look from an outside perspective. Some of them are experiments and just weird. Some of them I’ve revised, overwritten, underwritten, chopped and re-arranged so many times that I don’t even know if they make sense anymore. Some of them feel done, but you never know.

Now they’ll go into the hands of 13 peers to scribble all over and critique next week in class while I sit there silent. This makes most people nervous. It doesn’t make me nervous.

My school deserves credit for having no tolerance for assholes who speak disrespectfully or get aggressive during critique. For those of your in MFA programs that get off on stomping on the heads of others to climb to the top of the Big-Cool-Writer-Ego-Ladder, God help you. Creativity and ego are intimately tangled, and workshop is not a place for power struggles.

Maybe it would’ve been scary at an earlier time in my life. I’m glad I waited to go to grad school until I was grounded enough in my work (but not inflexible at all) to know what criticism to take and what to leave. If someone can justify a critical comment, especially if they can offer suggestions, awesome. I accept.

I’m mature enough to sniff out a remark intended to squash an ego for the sake of overpowering. And when someone has something constructive to say about my work, it’s not an insult. I am new at writing. I have a lot to learn. If it’s going to make me better, then good. But, I’m also decent at this. After several years of working my ass off at it, I get to say that. I know some of what I’m doing (but still have a ton to learn), so if you tell me to use passive voice or more adverbs, or of you swoon over a poem of mine that has no backbone or sloppy lines, I’m not going to listen to you.

I wrote a poem that my instructor hates. She thinks I need to give more character development, more detail and more explanation. (Over explained poems are the worst.) She said she didn’t understand what I was trying to do. But she doesn’t have to understand what I’m trying to do.

I think she’s wrong. It’s all there if the reader does a little work for it, and I made deliberate choices that I can defend. The poem is done: literally and intuitively. I told her disagree and I wouldn’t be changing it. She said what any good writer would: Okay, it’s your poem, you explained your choices. I respect that.

I showed the same piece to my thesis advisor and my friend, L. and without mentioning my instructor’s comments about it, both of them loved it. Had everyone I showed it to had a similar difficulty with it, I’d have to reconsider revising it. Because that wasn’t the case, I’m not gonna. I love that poem. No one else has to. But some of them do, and one of them doesn’t. No only am I okay with not pleasing everyone, even the published ones, I’m happy that I’m able to disagree and stick by what feels right to me.