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Payment for Single Day or Weekend Workshops in 2016

 

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$150 deposit to hold space in two or more workshops





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$200 Complete Payment for a Single Day Workshop





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$600 Complete Payment for June Weekend Retreat




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$600 Complete Payment for October Weekend Retreat




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“About, Among Other Things, God” by Pat Schneider

Listen to Pat read her poem: “About, Among Other Things, God”

http://patschneider.com/pat/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/About-Among-Other-Things-God.mp3

ABOUT, AMONG OTHER THINGS, GOD

Come.

The primrose blooms in the garden.

The mourning dove calls in the sycamore tree.

Rain on the sill of the window,

sounds of every kind of weather

are sweet in this old house.

Come.

In the pantry, jars of beans,

lentils, sunflower seeds. Sesame. Jars

of preserves, small cans

of spices stand in rows.

It is here.

A woman stands in the doorway

and calls. Her apron bleached from washings

and from hanging in the sun. Behind her,

through the doorway, the house

is dark and cool, and the word

that she calls into the late afternoon,

into the shadows gathering under the lilacs,

into the long, long shadow of the sycamore tree

is come.

Come home.

— Pat Schneider

2016 October Retreat –

HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN:
WRITING AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

 

October 15 – 17, 2016  — Amherst, Massachusetts

 

 

Writing Retreat with Pat Schneider and Kate Hymes

Based on Pat Schneider’s book, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice, Oxford University Press, 2013, this intimate retreat (limited to twelve participants) will offer times of group writing and response as well as the option of private responses by both Pat and Kate to written work sent earlier as specified below.



 

 

The focus will not be on writing devotional materials.  Rather, we will explore the idea that all writing may by intention be “spiritual,” whether the impulse is comic or tragic, earthy or ecstatic.  We will be invited, but not required, to explore what it might mean to see our writing as a method of personal spiritual search and growth, as well as a way to grow in craft and confidence as a writer in various genre. Writers of all levels of experience, and of all faiths or persuasions are welcome.

We expect to have a very good time together.

SPECIFICS OF THE RETREAT:

Because this retreat is so limited in number (see below) we are asking the following:

If you want to register for the retreat, but are not well known to Pat or Kate, please email us at pat (a) patschneider.com a brief introduction including something about yourself and why you would like to participate in this retreat. We will make our final decisions based

on creating a group that will work well together in this very special event.

Where:

All meetings, breakfasts and Saturday dinner will be in the Schneider’s 150 year old farmhouse near the center of Amherst, a short walk to Emily Dickinson’s grave and homestead, to the University of Massachusetts and Amherst College’s amazing Natural History and art museums, and near the Yiddish Book Center and the Children Book Art Museum. A list of places of residence will be sent upon request.

This is not a residential retreat.  Options for area residence will be sent upon request.

Maximum number of participants: 12

Schedule:

Mornings will be spent writing together, optional reading aloud and guided responses. Afternoons free for private conferences, or to write or explore Amherst. Evening writing sessions together.

Each participant will have optional half-hour private conferences with Pat and with Kate, with or without an edited response to three poems or six double-spaced pages of prose, to be sent separately by post or email to Pat and/or Kate dated no later than September 15, 2016. Please put in email subject line: “Manuscript for Retreat.”  If you do not receive word that we have received your email manuscript by one week later, please notify us.

 

 

Resumes for:

Pat Schneider: pat(at)patschneider.com.  One Page Resume Pat Schneider 2016

Kate Hymes: khymes(at)wallkillvalleywriters.com. Kate Hymes Biography

 

 

Meals

Saturday & Sunday mornings: continental breakfast at Pat’s home

Saturday lunch and dinner catered by the Black Sheep Deli.

 



Registration Fee: $600 ($200 deposit required to hold your place) Full registration fee required by September 1, 2016.

Pat Schneider led a one-day retreat like this one for my Wallkill Valley Writers in 2015. In this three day retreat, Pat will guide writers on an inner journey of spiritual awareness. The writing will gently and with grace lead you to find and explore the cracks of memory, grief and absence, failure, anger, and pain in order to let the light in, to let your light shine. The light you discover will illuminate the joy, forgiveness, quest for justice, and the comedy of being human. Pat describes writing as a form of prayer that allows us to praise, give thanksgiving, to rage, or to open one’s inner self and listen.

~ Kate Hymes, Founder/Director,

Wallkill Valley Writers and

sponsor of a similar workshop in New Paltz, NY, June, 2015

Please click here for the cancellation policy

 

 

I SIT AT MY MENTOR’S DESK

Elizabeth (Bye) Berryhill, 1920-2002

Written by Pat Schneider shortly before Elizabeth’s death.

 

 

I sit at her old desk, my laptop computer awkward between antique lamps. For me, this is a holy place, because it is a place of my own origin. A part of me was born here, raised here.  The part of me that became the adult, separate me.  The part of me that first believed I might become an artist with words.  The part of me that became a woman in the world, rather than a girl from a tenement.

I am sitting in Bye’s desk chair. Before me are two shelves – a bookcase made to fit the desk. The back of the big desk and the two shelves are stacked with orderly boxes, notebooks, envelopes clipped to box edges.  There are cans full of Number 2 pencils, and looking at them I remember Bye, one foot up on a low stage, another foot bearing her weight on the theatre floor, a pencil held poised above the clipboard on her knee, her face intent in thought as she looks into the space of the stage.

The pencil was her tool of choice. All around me are pencilled notes to herself, but among them, on a big bulletin board, there is a three-by-five card with a typed quote that I sent her.  I know this because she has penciled in a corner, “From Pat Schneider c. July 9, 1987.”  It is by Rainer Maria Rilke:

Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting

still has a shape in the kingdom o

ftransformation. When something’s let go of,

it circles;

and though we are rarely the center

of the circle, it draws around us its

unbroken, marvelous curve.

A small bulletin board at the side of the desk holds eight cards and pages of paper, all of them filled with her penciled words.

On the desk, back under the shelves, there are great notebooks full of her handwriting and her typed pages – the manuscript of the last, unfinished play.  On the top shelf, three portraits stand back behind boxes of books and papers.  The faces look over the boxes, and meet me eye to eye when I stand in front of the desk.  One photo is of two little girls.  It would have been taken about 1922, when Elizabeth was two and her sister, Anne, was four.  Another is Elizabeth alone, about four years old. She has told me how the two of them went into the grape arbors near their home.  It was so hot in Modesto in the season of ripe grapes, they went into the shallow irrigation ditch that ran under the grapes, opened the “trapdoors” in the back of their coveralls, put their bare bottoms into the cool, damp earth, and reached up over their heads to pick grapes.  They had contests to see who could get the most grapes into their mouths.  “Anne always won,” she finishes the story exactly the same way each time she tells me, “she had the biggest mouth.”

The third photograph is of someone she loved.

Clipped to a box on the bottom shelf, under notes about giving the theater archives to the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum, lists of phone calls, and a note about looking for some quilt blocks that her nephew “was speaking of when he was here recently” (the note is dated seven years before this moment of writing) — between penciled notes that say “Where did I put the lyrics to ‘Double Sky’? – Look for”  and “For Project (w) reunion GP Paul Newman outfit” there is a small note that reads:

WRITE BEFORE

ANYTHING ELSE!

Ted Gill’s expulsion

                              (omitted)

Those are two separate subjects.  The first is the story that brought about the loss of her second and last theater, The Festival Theater. The second is the story of her loneliness, and of a face that looks at me over the stacked papers and the line of books with all their little markers sticking up between pages. Elizabeth is 82 now, recovering from surgery for cancer and lens replacement to restore vision in her right eye.  Her left eye is blind. I wish she had written those two stories.

I write again now the words from Rilke, for they come to me this time from Bye.  I write them to hold on.  I do not want to let her go. I remember her strength, how the whole theater shone with her light, her intelligence, her personal charisma and power. The first production that I saw of Bye’s was Maxwell Anderson’s Lost In The Stars, the musical version of Alan Payton’s Cry, The Beloved Country.  The year was 1959.  I was a student at Pacific School of Religion, two years married and pregnant with my first child.  I “held the book” for the production, following the lines in the play script as actors began to say them by memory, prompting them when they needed it.  I learned like a dry sponge soaking up water.

The production was a stunning event.  We were trembling, as a nation, on the cusp of our civil rights revolution – but it had not happened yet.  No bus boycott.  No hoses aimed at black children.  No little girls blown up in church. There was a simmering quietude about race.  And Elizabeth walked across the great divide into black churches and auditioned for the African roles.  It was unheard of.  And to be involved in it, even at the level of holding the book, was exciting beyond anything I had ever experienced.

Cry, the beloved country . . . .

 

We’re lost out here in the stars –

Big stars, little stars,

falling through the night –

and we’re lost out here in the stars.

On the small bulletin board beside the desk, written in Elizabeth’s hand are several cards: one holds eleven questions by Arthur Miller about defining a character in a play.  Another holds eleven questions by John Osbourne.  The last card lists fifteen questions of Bye’s own.  She used them in writing for theater – one could do worse than to use them in writing fiction. 

(I offer her list to you by clicking here.)

Her mind is crystalline; her memory blazes. Not only stories, but names and histories and references from reading – all are accessible to her, and she delights in remembering and in going to check on any details in her worn dictionaries and reference books. Among other things, she taught me the importance of being parented by someone who is old – being taught how to grow old, and how to die. She did not always teach me by action that I wanted to follow.  Sometimes she taught me by action that I want to avoid, as in the years following the loss of the theater when she became reclusive and agoraphobic.  But even in the choices I do not choose for myself, I learned from her, and modeled myself after her or over against her choices.  In this, my own old age, I want to parent my children in that way.  I want to live boldly as she lived boldly most of her life, taking chances, being faithful to the people I love, and wrestling mightily with my own demons when they collect into what seems an overwhelming army.

Maybe what I am doing is less than admirable. I am sitting at Bye’s desk, reading and copying her notes to herself. But she invited me here. And I have not opened a single document, nor turned over a single page.  I am only trying to capture what is visible here, has been visible before when I have slept alone in this room, because the day will come when it is no longer here, save in my mind and heart.

Elizabeth is greatly loved, I know that.  I see it and hear it and touch it tangibly this time, as I see her nieces bringing her gifts and overhear her friends calling. Her niece Nancy had made a huge spinach spanikopita and a great batch of wonderful chicken soup for us to eat – already three days here have passed and I have not had to cook anything. Nancy came today with a dozen hot cross buns, and another niece, Elizabeth (“Elizabeth Junior,” Bye calls her) is coming this evening.  Bye is cherished, and I do not have to be anxious about her. No matter what happens, she will be tenderly cared for by people who deeply love her, and whom she has loved long and well.  My seeing that for certain may be the greatest gift I have received in these days.

Today I drove her in her ancient automobile down from the hills into downtown San Anselmo. In its day her car was considered a “compact” – now it seems a great ark of a vehicle. It has a standard shift attached to the steering column; it is ultimately simple.  And big.  She has been driving it since 1969 when she and her assistant, Casey (Marjorie Casebier McCoy, my roomate at Pacific School of Religion, my best friend) bought it together for use in Festival Theater. Together Bye and I tested the air in the tires and put 35 pounds in each tire.  She checked the oil and the water, rejoicing because for the first time in such a long while she was able to see the indicators herself. She has been unable to drive it for months because of her decreased vision; she wants it in running order in the hope that this surgery will restore enough vision to make it possible for her to drive again.  I hope – I truly hope and pray – that it may be so.

This morning I was reading aloud to Bye from Rachel Naomi Remen’s book, My Grandfather’s Blessings, and came across this line from Tuesday’s With Morrie —   “Death is the end of a lifetime, not the end of a relationship.”

It will be so.  Already it is so.

— Pat Schneider

 

As poets, how do we ask for the support we need from our families?

Q&A for July, 2015

Q from a writer in Ireland: Is it common for spouses or “significant others” to wonder what the hell you’re doing on the computer and why do you spend so long? I swear, I can be doing all sorts of work for everyone else, but when I start in typing a piece up or doing MY work, he hollers, “What are you doing?” It seems like they think, “Oh, she’s just writing!” Really, he’s a great person, but this irks me sometimes!!!

A: Yeah, dealing with family can be a hard one. Do you have “a room of one’s own?” Do you have a door you can close? Do you have the chutzpa to ask him to knock? (I have more than asked — I have insisted, but only after I turned about sixty and had HAD IT.)

What you are asking is not only reasonable, it is a survival need for the

artist. You must have uninterrupted solitude, or you simply cannot do your best work. Kafka wrote, “. . . one can never be alone enough when one writes . . . there can never be enough silence around when one writes . . . even night is not night enough.”

I suggest beginning gently. I have a quote from Rilke, printed nicely over the door on the inside of the little attic room where I write. It may not help a family member, but it does give me courage to work at insisting on uninterrupted solitude:

. . . because I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. — Rilke

Truly I think only one thing is a useful last resort. If you cannot stop another adult in your house from interrupting you when it is not an urgent matter, then cheerfully, not angrily, gather up your work, take it to your car, drive to a “greasy spoon,” order a drink, work there for a couple of hours, leave a good tip and go home cheerfully, not angrily. I almost guarantee if you do that a couple of times the bad behavior will stop.

___________________________________________________________________

ASK PAT . . .

Writers and leaders of writing groups, teachers of writing, and young writers are invited to write questions to Pat. She will choose one question each month for response. The questions may be edited, and will be anonymous, but if location and identity such as “Writer”, “Poet”, “Teacher”, or age of young writer is offered, that will be included. Offer a question: HERE

Ask Pat… As poets, how do we ask for the support we need from our families?

ASK PAT . . .

Writers and leaders of writing groups, teachers of writing, and young writers are invited to write questions to Pat. She will choose one question each month for response. The questions may be edited, and will be anonymous, but if location and identity such as “Writer”, “Poet”, “Teacher”, or age of young writer is offered, that will be included. Offer a question: HERE

___________________________________________________________________

Q&A for July, 2015

Q from a writer in Ireland: Is it common for spouses or “significant others” to wonder what the hell you’re doing on the computer and why do you spend so long? I swear, I can be doing all sorts of work for everyone else, but when I start in typing a piece up or doing MY work, he hollers, “What are you doing?” It seems like they think, “Oh, she’s just writing!” Really, he’s a great person, but this irks me sometimes!!!

A: Yeah, dealing with family can be a hard one. Do you have “a room of one’s own?” Do you have a door you can close? Do you have the chutzpa to ask him to knock? (I have more than asked — I have insisted, but only after I turned about sixty and had HAD IT.)

What you are asking is not only reasonable, it is a survival need for the

artist. You must have uninterrupted solitude, or you simply cannot do your best work. Kafka wrote, “. . . one can never be alone enough when one writes . . . there can never be enough silence around when one writes . . . even night is not night enough.”

I suggest beginning gently. I have a quote from Rilke, printed nicely over the door on the inside of the little attic room where I write. It may not help a family member, but it does give me courage to work at insisting on uninterrupted solitude:

. . . because I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. — Rilke

Truly I think only one thing is a useful last resort. If you cannot stop another adult in your house from interrupting you when it is not an urgent matter, then cheerfully, not angrily, gather up your work, take it to your car, drive to a “greasy spoon,” order a drink, work there for a couple of hours, leave a good tip and go home cheerfully, not angrily. I almost guarantee if you do that a couple of times the bad behavior will stop.

“The Grandmother” by Pat Schneider

Listen to Pat read her poem: “The Grandmother”

http://patschneider.com/pat/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/The-Grandmother.mp3

THE GRANDMOTHER

FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF EIGHTY

Our house in summer.

Today is my birthday. For the eighty-first time, June 1, 1934 to June 1, 2015. Eighty-one birthdays. I want to give to you, my reader, a birthday gift. Two, in fact. But in order to know what the gifts are, you must read on to the end!

This birthday is one of the best. For one thing, 81 is far less disturbing an idea than 80. 80 was O.M.G. terrifying. 81 is just more of the same. Cool – I’m “in my eighties.” No longer a stone of stumbling – more like bedrock.

Yesterday, the last day of May, Becca, my first-born, and her husband, Will came. In a day of occasional rain-showers, Becca and I worked in the flower beds around this old house. Gardening in the rain – it was purely delicious. Of course I mostly had to stand and supervise because of my left hip’s tendency to disconnect. She had the fun of getting mud all over herself. After this year’s long, merciless winter, we were surrounded by the green of spruce and maple, the white of peony and Japanese dogwood, and the yellow of iris and baby marigolds.

This house has stood here in the center of Amherst for a hundred and fifty years – since around the end of the Civil War. It belonged to African Americans for close to a hundred years, and it came to us as a kind of gift and pure miracle – a story I have told in a book titled Wake Up Laughing.

The house where I was born.

But this is not about the book, or the house, both of which I like a lot. This is about this day. This eighty-first day of my birth. I’ve always loved my birthday – and I’ve been a little embarrassed to say so. My love of it started with my mother. She did a lot of things that weren’t so good in her mothering, and I have followed Sharon Old’s practice in her poem, “I Go Back to May, 1937” in which she says to her parents as young, unmarried images perhaps in a photograph, “Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.”

Maybe I have not “told about” enough of what my complicated, troubled mother did right. One of those was giving me her love of poetry. Every first day of June she recited a long portion of James Russell Lowell’s poem, “The Vision of Sir Launfal” which begins,

……………And what is so rare as a day in June?

……………Then, if ever, come perfect days;

……………Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,

……………And over it softly her warm ear lays;

……………Whether we look, or whether we listen,

……………We hear life murmur, or see it glisten . . .

4039 Olive Street

— she (and therefore I, to this very day) could go on, and on. I think I tortured my only sibling, Sam, by quoting to him the first line at least twice a year, pointing out to him that his birthday, the 21st of December was almost the shortest day of the year, while mine was almost the longest day. And what is so rare . . .”

This year was one of the all time best birthdays. After getting wet and muddy, then getting dry and warm, Becca played her new ukulele with her newly calloused fingers from practicing, songs that she knows I love – folk songs, black and white gospel, country songs. “Here’s one you love,” she said, remembering my teaching it to our four children as we travelled three thousand miles from Massachusetts in a VW bus to visit Peter’s parents in California:

……………I love the mountains,

……………I love the rolling hills,

……………I love the flowers,

……………I love the daffodils,

……………I love the fireside

……………When all the lights are low

……………Boom-de-ah-dah, Boom-de-ah-da . . .

— and then there was lemon cake – -the absolute most lemony lemon cake I ever tasted, and I remembered how as a child her face would pucker in disbelief when I ate a sliver of lemon rind, raw.

It was a lovely day.

I stayed up late at night and watched the clock tick down my eightieth year. I was glad to see it go. It had been a hard, hard year. Many changes. Losses. Griefs.

In the last weeks of my eightieth year I decided to read again Toni Morrison’s book, Beloved. It had been so many years since I read it, I thought I had forgotten all but the central plot situation. But as I read, every scene was one I remembered – only I had forgotten that all of those scenes came from Beloved. It was sort of like reading the Bible or Shakespeare. Very familiar images, phrases, and the thought: OH! Is that from Shakespeare? OH! is that beloved scene from Beloved?

I read the entire book, but what I needed to read – what in my experience and belief I was led to read – came early, on page 36. There Sethe tells Denver things I needed to hear, beginning with the words at the bottom of page 35, “I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it.” I was given a call to love this place that is my home in a new and deeper way. I told the ancient (as I myself am now ancient) African-American woman who told us we needed to be in this house – I told her that it would remain her house until I had lived in it for 42 years – as long as she had lived in it. It has been “only” 35 years. She died many years ago. But I need to talk to her, Sister Susan DaCosta, “Mrs. D.” I need to ask her to let me co-own it now. I need to belong to this land, to “rememory” it and to listen for the times when I “bump into” Mrs. D’s “rememories.” It is a call that gives me joy.

Now. I have a gift for you, reader, who has come this far with me. Two gifts, if you want both of them.

First, I give you the new poem that follows. It is new, unbaptized by much editing. It may be raw and unfinished. I wrote it longhand day before yesterday and typed it up today.

Second, that book I mentioned at the start of this personal essay, the one that tells how we got this house, sits in my basement in stacks of boxes. It is one of my favorites of my books, well reviewed on Amazon, etc. But we haven’t promoted it, and there are too many copies. If you would like a signed copy for yourself or as a gift signed to someone else, click HERE to order it from my website, tell me how you would like it inscribed, and you may have it for $5 to cover postage and handling.

POEM ON THE EVE

OF AN 81st BIRTHDAY

June 1, 2015

A blessed day — a beautiful

blessed day at the tip-end

of May, at the tip end of

a lifetime of May endings,

the bendings of the heart

toward June, through the

noontime of a life, toward

the mourning dove’s evening

courting call and all

the sweetness that the aftermath

of winter cannot count down . . .

Around and around the sun

we fly, and then we die.

And isn’t it miraculous

that no one knows for certain why

the rusted horseshoe holds

the body of the horse, and

the worn-out human body holds

the reins, the ride, the wind

that stirs the leaving.

In the end, what is more real,

the horseshoe, or the horse?

The body, or the ride?

Neither the horse or rider asks

where the morning went.

In the end, the body

is impediment.

……………After reading page 36 of

…………… Beloved, by Toni Morrison

BRINGING TREASURE TO THE SURFACE

Beginning Thursday June 4, Sue Reynolds and I will be leading a combined SoulCollage and writing retreat in Amherst. I asked her to write a guest blog on my site this month to explain SoulCollage a little bit, because it can be difficult to understand if you haven’t done it for yourself.

_________________________

“I am the one who goes into the depths to retrieve treasure.”

A Guest Blog by Sue Reynolds

 

When Pat offered to let me write a guest blog on her site, I was delighted to share a little of the SoulCollage® process.

This card pictured to the left may be my favourite, of all the many (over 200!) I have created over the years.

It’s called “The Depth Seeker” and my journal entry around this begins: “I am the one who goes into the depths seeking my treasure.” This defines the work we do as writers and artists.

The cavernous background conveys the vastness of those depths. This isn’t about going down a narrow well and climbing back out again immediately. This is about descending into and investigating a whole other world.

The very young child stepping tentatively down the stairs from the floor where he/she is “supposed to” stay represents many things to me. He or she says that:

 
much of what lies in those depths was laid down when we were very young;

 

descending like this can be a transgressive act and we are often afraid we will be punished if we investigate those depths;

 

the fear about what lies down there may be over-inflated, the way a child may be terrified about what lies under the bed, or in the dark when the lights are turned off;

 

or what is down there may be legitimately frightening and unmanageable because a child doesn’t have the power to fix or change it.

 

The glittering diamond represents the beauty of what can be gained when we summon enough courage to go deep.

The jewel also represents the transformative power of the work. Diamonds are a metamorphic stone – created by applying high temperature and high pressure to carbon at a depth of between 87 and 118 miles below the surface of the Earth. Metaphorically we can also be subject to tremendous pressure far below consciousness; applying the heat of attention can be transformative. Through the metamorphic process carbon is transformed into faceted nuggets of tremendous beauty and value; so we attain diamonds of wisdom through this work.

Diamonds can be made into tools. The analogy there is, I think, that the more of this work we do, the more equipped we are to do this work.

I am the one who facilitates this work with clients through my training and experience as a SoulCollage® facilitator, as an AWA-certified writing facilitator, and as a psychotherapist.

And I am the one who does this work in my own life, for my own Self and Soul.

I just read this over, and I realize that I haven’t said that this process of making SoulCollage® cards is FUN. It’s artistic, but it’s easy – with skills available to anyone – skills you probably exercised in kindergarten: cutting with scissors, sticking with glue. When a day of SoulCollage® is over, generally participants can’t believe how much time has passed and that it’s time to quit.

SoulCollage® is a fabulous practice for writers because it’s all about metaphor. It’s particularly juicy for poets because of its imagistic, metaphorical nature. Often we choose images based on barely recognized impulses to begin with – impulses that mostly come from an emotional, rather than a cognitive, place. The work can be done intentionally, but intuition is often the guide in this process.

Two weeks from now, from June 4 to 7, Pat Schneider and I will be leading our second retreat in Amherst combining writing and SoulCollage®.

The beautiful part about this retreat is that SoulCollage® is only one half of what we will do; this is also about writing with Pat Schneider’s guidance (and occasionally mine). After our days of visual creation are finished, we will be led to write from our images, in directions both intuitive and intentional.

It would be wonderful if you could join us. There are still a couple of places available.

Click here to read more about the retreat.

What is the best way to learn how to write better poems?

Q:  What is the best way to learn how to write better poems?

 

A:  First, let’s eliminate the worst possibilities.  In my experience, the worst possible way is to join a class or workshop where the teacher’s or leader’s method is to show everyone what they did wrong, so go home and fix it.  A good workshop , for example, using the Amherst Writers & Artists method ,will put praise for what is strong first in every response, giving the emerging poet a foundation of strength on which to offer suggestions that will help him or her to build increasing craft.

Another worst possibility is doing nothing but continuing to love only what you loved in childhood and youth, being unwilling to explore and learn from what is happening right now in the world of poetry.

And a third not-so-good possibility is working entirely alone, with no good feedback, suggestion, encouragement, or praise.  Family doesn’t count.  Almost always, they care too much, know your material too well, have alternate views of your mutual history, and in short, get in the way of your progress.  Best to wait for a published poem before sharing it with family members.  Or if you must show them, tell them ahead of time you don’t want any opinions except what they love, because your poem is still a “cake in the oven” and with even a breath of cold air (criticism) it may fall.

Now, the good ways to learn.  First, leave the old classics alone.  What Wordsworth and Keats wrote in their lifetimes was fresh, new, interesting, and brave to their contemporaries.  You already know their rhythms, their sentiments, their craft.  Read poems written since you yourself became an adult.  Go to the library and find your contemporary poets.  Give each poet a chance by reading at least three poems by each author.  Read the poems out loud, maybe walk around your room as you read, so your body as well as your ears and your mind enter the poem.  Read each poem at least three times, listening to it, feeling it.   Find in the anthology the poem you like the best, and let that poet become your teacher.  Get more of his or her books.   Try “copy-cat” poems, following the pattern exactly, but using different words, different images.  If, for example, you are liking and copy-catting Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” you might want to put a little epigraph at the top of your poem, lower-case, italicized, and in a small font,  — after Wallace Stevens, to give credit for the form of the poem.    If your form is different, as well as your content, you don’t have to give credit.  You have made a new poem and it is your own, with a little “literary influence.”  Now, do the same with a poem you don’t understand, or don’t like.  What is that poet doing, and why?  Could you use anything from that poet’s style?

Another important thing is not to work entirely alone.  Find a writing partner who will meet with you regularly, or join a group, workshop, or class.  The way to know whether what you have chosen is good for you is this simple “acid test.”  First, give it a try a couple of times.  Examine yourself after each meeting.  Do you feel more like writing, or less like writing?  If more, great.  Do it again.  If less, it is poison to you as a writer.  Quit.

With your partner or group, follow the method described in my book, Writing Alone and With Others, or some other method that you invent or that you find elsewhere that is supportive of natural voice and encouraging to exploration.  You don’t need a lot of authoritative “DO THIS” rules, or “DON’T DO THIS” limitations.  (I know, I know, I gave you a few of both above!)

Last, and most important, I do believe that becoming a better poet  — or any other kind of artist — is a lifetime process. Pablo Casals, perhaps the greatest cellist of the 20th century, began every day by playing all six Bach unaccompanied cello suites. He was asked, “Why do you play all six suites each day?” He said, “Because I think I’m getting better.”   I am eighty now; childcare is far behind me,  work as an administrator of Amherst Writers & Artists is a decade behind me.  At last my artistic challenge is exactly what you state in your question.  “How do I become a better poet?”  By committing myself again every day to practice and to learn, so I can say, “I think I’m getting better.”

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ASK PAT . . .

Writers and leaders of writing groups, teachers of writing, and young writers are invited to write questions to Pat. She will choose one question each month for response. The questions may be edited, and will be anonymous, but if location and identity such as “Writer”, “Poet”, “Teacher”, or age of young writer is offered, that will be included. Offer a question: HERE