I've posted a new Poetry Kitchen class, a one-day generative-writing session I'm calling "Poems of Defiance, Poems of Love: Making New Work in Hard Times." It seemed to me that this kind of community resistance might be what many of us need--a day for focusing on how we, and others before and around us, turn to words at moments of crisis. The class will take place on April 19, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern Time, and the link will give you further details and the registration form. You might want to snag a space soon if you're interested, as it's already starting to fill.

I didn't intend to use my day off yesterday to start designing a new class, but I was playing with a poem draft that was going nowhere and I needed to find some way of being productive. Sometimes a planned writing day just doesn't work out. And that's okay. Thank goodness, I am way beyond beating myself up over writing disappointments. I was trying to work in a form that was resisting me, and I did figure out why: because the form was based on a spelling constraint, and my lines required more sonic freedom. I may not have made a poem, but I did make a poetic discovery, which is its own version of success.

Lately my teaching has been centering more and more around the notion of self-awareness. Simply: "Look hard at your work. What is it?" Over the past several years, this has become a center of my own practice--a way to sidestep self-judgment and external expectation and concentrate on "What, precisely, have I made?" If I can really see what's there, I can begin to imagine what could be there.

This shift in focus has made a tremendous difference in my ability to truly experiment with my material. I may be a timid driver, but I do not want to be a timid poet. For the great poems are fictions--which is to say, even those poems that seem to ride on the voice of an intimate speaker in a homely situation do not reenact real life but create an imaginative portal into a frame of time, space, and emotional shimmer. To build and refine such an artifact, the poet has to study and study and study again--without judgment, without preconception--what exists on the page and in the air: now, at this exact moment, in this exact version.

Achieving such clarity is not an exercise in logic. It's an exercise in immersion. It is opening your awareness to the multiplicity of your achievements. It is looking at your draft with love.