The poetry workshop ended on a good note for me — including going out afterward for a burger and beer with a couple of the other poets.
My revision of Still Life With Lunch got a great reception. All the scaffolding is gone. In all honesty, I do believe that it’s a better poem. I had to take out stuff I liked, but the stuff I liked wasn’t adding to the power of the piece. So, what I learned from Grennon is that it’s worth it to keep revising and revising — IF what you want is an artistically crafted and meaningful poem. I’m still learning.
Meanwhile, my Road Runner connection keeps coming and going, so I have no idea how much I’ll be able to post.
There are some poems written by some of the other poets in the workshop that I’d like to post here. I’m going to email them next week and get their permission. Maybe they’ll let me post their “before” and “after” as well.
There were some changes suggested for my final Vermeer’s Lady poem (as well as a comment by Grennon that I was being “weird” and “shades of Sylvia Plath”. I think he was just trying to be funny, since my poem was the only one that was, indeed, a little weird.) I’ll post the final version when I make the minor changes.
As a final learning experience, Grennon shared copies of the umpteen pages of revisions that finally resulted in this poem by Elizabeth Bishop. Her papers are in the archives of Vassar College.
Now I’ve got to clean up around my computer, so that when the Road Runner guy comes over tomorrow to figure out what’s going on, I won’t have anything incriminating hanging around. 🙂