Donald Hall on Poetry and Ambition

Donald Hall, from his (in)famous Poetry and Ambition

So the workshop answers the need for a cafe. But I called it the institutionalized cafe, and it differs from the Parisian version by instituting requirements and by hiring and paying mentors. Workshop mentors even make assignments: "Write a persona poem in the voice of a dead ancestor." "Make a poem containing these ten words in this order with as many other words as you wish." "Write a poem without adjectives, or without prepositions, or without content. . . ." These formulas, everyone says, are a whole lot of fun. . . . They also reduce poetry to a parlor game; they trivialize and make safe-seeming the real terrors of real art. This reduction-by-formula is not accidental. We play these games in order to reduce poetry to a parlor game. Games serve to democratize, to soften, and to standardize; they are repellent. Although in theory workshops serve a useful purpose in gathering young artists together, workshop practices enforce the McPoem.

This is your contrary assignment: Be as good a poet as George Herbert. Take as long as you wish.

So does this mean we can't teach young poets by such means? Is that all we can do, say, "see that great poet? go be like her!" My students are smart young women and men. They know the difference between an excursion helping them to see and a poem that teaches them something in its making, that resonates beyond the formula. Write a deep context poem. Sure. It's a trick, a pattern, a suggestion. And it comes along with "Don't write a Google-poem, a wiki-poem." And then we talk about that. And then they go to an American lit class and meet the unilimited ambition of Whitman and Melville. And the uncertainty.

Coming soon--"how not to write a google poem" and "what can be taught and when."

dw