I may have broken my brain.
This Friday through Sunday, I'll be attending the Philadelphia Writer's Conference in Philadelphia, PA. On Saturday and Sunday morning, I'm signed up to take a poetry intensive with noted poet and writer, A.V. Christie. To say I am excited about it is an understatement.
Please add to that excitement the additional conditions of "nervousness" and "fear", after I got an email advising me to (a) bring a short poem along to the workshop on Saturday morning and (b) read an essay by William Carlos Williams on "The Poem as a Field of Action".
(a) I am understandably nervous about sharing any of my work in front of someone with Christie's bona fides and
(b) I am both nervous and frightened about what I've gotten myself into as a result of the Williams essay, which is, in my opinion, a difficult slog through swamps of bloviation, with pockets of poetic jealousy. I was prepared to be enthralled by Williams, you see. He's known for such concise poems, full of imagery and such. His essay is . . . not that. It is meandering and in some places so full of digressions that he never comes back to his main point, which appears to be, if I have sussed it out correctly after spending more than two hours reading the essay and tracking down the stuff he references in parentheses to himself about Proust and modern physics and poems by other people, is this: We ought to consider changing the structure of poetry itself and not be bound by archaic forms (and metric feet), and we ought to write using plain American English, a point that Williams plainly forgot when writing this essay, which he delivered to a roomful of college students in 1958. I can only imagine that they all fled the room afterwards in puzzlement. Either that, or Williams boiled it down and stated things more clearly in person.
And now, to re-read the essay. Because it was assigned, and is therefore, I presume, somehow important.
Please add to that excitement the additional conditions of "nervousness" and "fear", after I got an email advising me to (a) bring a short poem along to the workshop on Saturday morning and (b) read an essay by William Carlos Williams on "The Poem as a Field of Action".
(a) I am understandably nervous about sharing any of my work in front of someone with Christie's bona fides and
(b) I am both nervous and frightened about what I've gotten myself into as a result of the Williams essay, which is, in my opinion, a difficult slog through swamps of bloviation, with pockets of poetic jealousy. I was prepared to be enthralled by Williams, you see. He's known for such concise poems, full of imagery and such. His essay is . . . not that. It is meandering and in some places so full of digressions that he never comes back to his main point, which appears to be, if I have sussed it out correctly after spending more than two hours reading the essay and tracking down the stuff he references in parentheses to himself about Proust and modern physics and poems by other people, is this: We ought to consider changing the structure of poetry itself and not be bound by archaic forms (and metric feet), and we ought to write using plain American English, a point that Williams plainly forgot when writing this essay, which he delivered to a roomful of college students in 1958. I can only imagine that they all fled the room afterwards in puzzlement. Either that, or Williams boiled it down and stated things more clearly in person.
And now, to re-read the essay. Because it was assigned, and is therefore, I presume, somehow important.