Some notes on how this online workshop works by the instructor, Tom Daley
The course is designed in a message board format, with different
"forums" for lectures, assignments, revisions,
guidelines and a forum for posting non-assignment poems.
The workshop postings are only available to people who have
registered for the course. This is not a public online workshop.
There is not a chat room component.
At the beginning of the week (Sunday), I post a lecture
with an assignment. Participants have until noon of the
following Sunday to post the poems they write based on the
assignment. The site is available for postings twenty-four
hours a day, seven days a week, with the very occasional
hour of down time for maintenance.
Although I am not always the first person to critique the
posted poem, I try to get to the poems as soon as possible.
Every poem generated by the assignment will be critiqued
at the very latest by Saturday after the Sunday deadline.
I ask all participants to critique at least two poems by
other poets generated by the assignment each week, and encourage
them to write more than two critiques if they are willing
and able.
Participants have a right to post one revision each week
after the first week in addition to the assignment poem.
These are also critiqued by other participants and by me,
but usually with a little more brevity than the critiques
of the assignment poems.
I ask that any critique start with a specific explanation
of what works in the poem and then move on to an explanation
of how the critic would improve the poem if it were her
or his creation. I ask that the critic address the poem
and not the poet. By speaking to the poem and not the poet,
we create some level of protection in what is unavoidably
a very vulnerable situation for the creator of the work
we are evaluating. This also mitigates the trouble caused
by the often-fallacious assumption that the opinions or
emotions expressed in the poem belong to the poet and not
the speaker of the poem. We can hardly expect that the cranky,
sinister monk of Robert Browning's "Soliloquy of the
Spanish Cloister" is the same person as the author,
although Browning and his monk may have shared some personal
characteristics. But if one were to read the poem and were
to assume that the speaker is identical to the poet, one
might feel understandably compelled to denounce the poet's
moral turpitude instead of deciding whether the poem has
been constructed out of imaginative elements or not.
Furthermore, sometimes people know each other from previous
workshops. Addressing the author of poems one has worked
with in other workshops can, if not checked, lead to a feeling
of being excluded on the part of the participants who aren't
already acquainted (e.g. --"This stanza reminds me
of that great poem you brought to Ms. Lanier's workshop.")
Participants may and are encouraged to weigh in on each
other's critiques, as long as everyone weighing in on the
poem observes the above guidelines. Sometimes a lively debate
ensues as people comment on each other's posts. The poet
can post a request for a clarification of a point someone
else makes in the critic’s evaluation of her or his
poem, but explaining or defending one's own poem is very
bad workshop practice. The point is to try to learn from
the critiques, not to mount a defense of the poem. If a
critic or all the critics don't understand what a poet is
doing, that should be very valuable information for a rewrite.
I prefer this approach to a chat room as I, as instructor
and moderator, can exercise some control without having
to be on 24/7 vigilance. In the last online workshop I ran,
people occasionally posted messages addressing the poet
and attributing things (usually positive but nevertheless
inappropriate) to the poet's character. I was able to check
this very understandable impulse by writing them privately.
This minimized embarrassment and the resulting ill will.
I am available for private correspondence during the workshop,
although I encourage participants to air their aesthetic
concerns by posting in the various forums. Personal issues
should always be handled privately between the instructor
and the participant.
The structure of this workshop is designed to create a collegial
atmosphere for enhancing the craft of poetry making. Some
remarkable transformations occurred in the last workshop.
I am sure we will be able to say the same thing at the end
of this one.
I hope this clarifies the mechanics of the workshop. If
you have further questions, please address them to me at
tom@onlineschoolofpoetry.org
Tom Daley.
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