I got to lead a very fun poetry revision workshop in Portsmouth yesterday (though it would have been even more fun if I'd slept the night before). The participants were all members of the same writing group, so they had a long familiarity with each others' personality and writing style. It was interesting to step into this ongoing relationship, stirring the waters a bit but also benefiting from their existing ease with one another.

I like to lead these kinds of workshops "cold"--which is to say, I don't want to read the poems beforehand and construct heavily annotated teacherly reactions. I want everyone in the room to be equals: all of us first-time readers of a new draft, all finding our paths into it, often awkwardly, often second-guessing ourselves, positing one possibility and then another, because that's how revision really works. I think of it as a way to model a pattern of mind--"how to be a reviser" rather than "follow my precepts, student." As I say every year at the Frost Place, my goal as a teacher is to teach myself out of a job--to bring poets into confident engagement with their own minds and their own work.

This method of teaching is tiring, for sure, because it requires intense concentration in the moment, not just on the draft under study, but on the poet's personality and on the temper of the communal responses. What, in a particular poem, should be singled out in this context for a 10-minute conversation? How can that conversation honor the richness of the draft while being forthright about next steps? How can I allow room for multiple possibilities--for the poet's own creative growth--while offering a structural security ("you might try this, or this, or this")? These are the on-the-spot dances I like to do. But it's exhausting work, and I did come home last night looking and feeling like a flayed rabbit. Thank goodness for a real night's sleep and a slow morning after.