Toward the end of last night's class, I asked participants to think about what gives them satisfaction within their own work . . . not necessarily equating satisfaction with joy or accomplishment--but rather, in the process and creation of the art, what gives them the deep pleasure of maker or explorer.

This turned out to be a surprisingly rich moment in the discussion--not just because participants zeroed in on the ways in which poetry allows them to think and behave in ways that regular life does not--e.g., wildly, with abandon--but also because it is so hard for people to simply bask for a moment in the pleasures of their art. Immediately dissatisfaction creeps in: I should, I wish, I struggle. People feel they should be different sorts of poets, with different sorts of subjects. They suffer over imperfection. This is, of course, quite natural. And yet sometimes the dissatisfactions overwhelm our ability to rest productively within our own creations. Why write, if we don't take the time to love our own work?