Poetry as poison, poetry as crime circuit, poetry as espionage. Hi! It's quite lovely outside though ants are attacking my desk. So much to talk about here.

The workshop & the workshopped poem. I get this idea. I mean, I see how it's feasible that we end up with a "workshopped" aesthetic, considering how similar most workshops are that I've been in, aside from the people. I mean the basic format. But I wonder, does that really produce homogeneous work? I wonder how you guys would say your work has been changed by the workshops. There have definitely been changes made to my work, but more to the technical stuff. Like, hi, bad grammar issues. Or if I see that everyone is reading a line a certain way (I'm pretty democratic about it) which I don't intend, I'll probably change it. Because I won't be there to argue with the reader when it's in a Real Book. BUt other than that, I think the real value of the workshop is community building. Just being in a group of people that share your concerns and passions for the work. I am an extrovert & I get energized by talking to people. I think it actually helps my brain become sharper.

And then in our new Juliana format workshop, I really like the idea of the creative responses being a way to show how you read. In our craft class I was too scared most weeks to try a creative response. I thought it would have been easier to explain what I thought the work was doing to me. But it was never easy! I ended up being very vague & pointing out insignificant things. It was a poor translation of the actual experience of reading. I think the best way to examine how we read a poem is to write a poem back. When I did the cowboy narrativo version of Scott's poem, I think that was just one possible poem that I could have written to say the same thing, which is: how Scott's original made me feel. It's like, say, you make a big sculpture of a staircase & you paint it pink. And this makes me feel all these things. And I could try to explain it but it would be better to write a poem about/out of a mailbox which is missing numbers. Because in my mind the two things are related somehow. And though my response might not be logically, causally related, it might do just as good of a job of "explaining" how I read your sculpture. In the end this might be more valuable for you, and might be much more valuable then me saying, hmm I like the staircase but I'd like to see more steps and less bannister, just because.

Then there is English and then there is bleach. I just bought some bleach at Walgreen's. I have weird feelings about buying it at grocery stores because I don't like poison in the same bag as my food. I don't think I would ever put it next to my baby.

I have to think more about the English thing. I have very little authority on this because it's the only language I'm fluent in, and it's so widespread that I rarely have to think about it. I will say this, though. The few times that I've been in foreign countries where I didn't fluently speak the language, it was a very psychedelic experience. Like almost being able to understand what's going on, but questioning everything, constantly asking yourself "Did she really just say that? Am I crazy?" Kind of like poetry? Especially in France. Like, yes I understood that word and that word all those words, but not in that string, that combination! Does not compute. So I'll just sit here and pretend they're talking about pink staircases.