My workshop meets on Monday nights and I am learning to dread them. I can't explain what it was about today's class. Everything was so over-sentimentalized. Wondering why no one reads poetry? Look at my class and the utter lack of feeling involved. Did I have too much coffee? Uncomfortable seats? Missy pissing me off over the weekend? I sat there for three hours as we discussed our reactions to other student's poetry. One of the suppossd "benefits" of avant-garde poetry is that it is generative, i.e. it allows you to draw your own conclusions instead of being led along by the author. A good way to draw conclusions is through free-writing, or stream-of-consciousness exercises. You take a poem or a passage and write for five minutes (I need FIVE minutes!). With the exception of Robin S. and myself, the class drooled their words. Pompous. We should never be read. We get the rock stars we deserve. At Clarion, there was a fear of something called group-think which means that all critiques and all the stories sound the same. Group-think has dug its shit-fingered claws into my workshop.

Or maybe it is that I have read so much good poetry lately - Bataille, Lautreamont, Baudrillard, Ballard, Yeats. If anyone is interested, I strongly recommend the "The Prose Poem: An International Journal" for a review of what I consider to be some of the best poetry in existence today. The benefit of the prose poem for the poet is that you don't worry about line breaks but you can still keep the poetic language. Russell Edison's is the last entry of the journal. His proem is called "The Prose Poem as a beautiful Animal"

"He had been writing a prose poem, and had succeeded in mating a giraffe with an elephant. Scientists from all over the world came to see the product: The body looked like and elephant's, but it had the neck of a giraffe with a small elephant's head and short trunk that wiggled like a wet noodle.
You have created a beautiful new animal, said one of the scientists.
Do you really like it?
Like it? cried the scientist, I adore it, and would love to have sex with it that I might create another beautiful animal..."

My sentiments exactly. If you are a fiction writer, you can call yourself a "flash-fictionist" if the word poem disagrees with you. Short, dense chunks of prose. The ultimate hybrid. Pardon me now as I go fuck the elegirafant.

I feel better. Thank you for listening.

DON'T TOUCH ME!