It Doesn't Work For Me: A Critique of the Workshop Approach to Teaching Poetry Writing and a Suggestion For Revision

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by faulty pedagogy ...

John Undergrad is a second-year college student whose degree will be in Business Management, but he's not all business. While interning at a bank last summer, he received two reprimands for writing poetry on the job. He didn't mind though; the poems came to him, and he felt like he had to jot them down, despite the consequences. He's been a closet poet ever since an encouraging high-school English teacher intrigued him with the irony in Edwin Arlington Robinson's 'Richard Cory' and the rhymed storytelling in Robert Service's 'The Creation of Sam McGee.' John uses an elective on a class in poetry writing, hoping he'll learn more about poets such as Robinson and Service and how to emulate them. He spends weeks listening to discussions, not of published verses by established writers, but of drafts by his fellow students, and he occasionally chimes in, saying 'I like it' or 'It doesn't quite work for me.'

Then his turn comes; he makes twenty copies of a poem he has written, reads it aloud, and waits. The teaching assistant says 'It's a bit sentimental, isn't it class?' One student says 'The long lines are a risk, but you get away with it.' A second student, an English literature buff and the class star, says 'The religious imagery is too Miltonic, and the end rhymes make the poem feel old-fashioned.' John isn't sure what the teaching assistant means by 'sentimental,' he knows he hasn't been trying to 'get away' with anything, he's not sure what 'end rhyme' is, and he definitely doesn't know what 'Miltonic' means. But he has learned workshop etiquette; instead of asking these questions and appearing defensive, he simply says 'thank you for the feedback,' and silently vows never to show his poems to anyone again. He tells his friends in the Business Department that he took a poetry writing class because 'It's an easy "A",' and several of them sign up the following semester.

John's sister, Jane Graduate Student, holds a degree in English Literature with a writing emphasis. She completed three poetry writing workshops at her undergraduate institution, where her work received great praise from two college instructors, and she placed three poems in a local literary journal. She enjoys reading Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and her two instructors, but beyond that she doesn't really 'get' most poetry. Upon graduation from the MFA program, she plans to seek a job teaching creative writing. She looks at what her instructors do in class, and thinks that it would be fun and easy. However, sometimes she doubts herself, as when she gets writer's block and can't seem to get unstuck or when she reads through poems in the local literary journal and can't make sense of them. She is also concerned because she vaguely knows of forms such as the villanelle and the ghazal, but she isn't confident about her ability to identify and define them, much less write them. As an unconscious means of hiding these insecurities and protecting her status as class star, she finds herself using terms such as 'enjambment,' 'pentameter,' and 'metonymy' without quite knowing what they mean.

While John Undergrad and Jane Graduate Student are composites of students I have observed, their fictionalized experiences typify the results of pedagogical methods used in contemporary college classrooms in the United States. The pedagogical methodology most commonly used in American colleges functions more as a convenience for the instructors than as a vehicle for meeting the needs of students. The traditional workshop model of teaching undergraduate poetry writing has gone virtually unquestioned for the past seventy years and has been ratified by hundreds of universities, treated as the way to teach creative writing, despite a paucity of studies or empirical evidence or proof. Established in 1931 as a method for teaching elite graduate students, the traditional workshop model does not adequately address or even consider the needs of apprentice writers; it does not encourage instructors to take their jobs or their students seriously; it routinely puts students on the defensive and discourages them from taking necessary, productive risks in their writing; and it fosters unhealthy competition among students that hinders their growth as writers. The typical creative writing teacher who simply has students read their drafts aloud and then leads full-class discussions about these student texts is like a physical education teacher who just rolls out a ball and tells the kids to play. The result is the same: undisciplined students without much technique or skill – and a lot of injuries!

Dave Smith makes a good point when he asks in his book Local Assays: 'Doesn't it seem a bit unnatural to begin a workshop of college students by immediately throwing their poems into a public scrutiny and asking that public for a response?' In that book, Smith goes on to discuss a sequence designed to give students practice critiquing texts before actually addressing each others' work, but he stays inside the box of the traditional workshop model, rather than offering a substantive alternative to the process that he has correctly diagnosed as unnatural. Teaching Poetry Writing: A Five-Canon Approach, is a book for poetry writing instructors who wish to step outside of the box and consider a paradigm that is quite different from the traditional workshop approach. By following the approach laid out in this book, poetry writing instructors at all levels can ensure that their students are armed with an arsenal of invention strategies, conversant about form and structure, capable of identifying and writing in a variety of styles, equipped to quote large quantities of poetry from memory, and attuned to the oral/aural elements of poetry.

If the traditional workshop model is so ineffective, why do 76% of undergraduate poetry writing teachers still use it as their primary mode of instruction?

There is no sound theoretical basis for using the traditional workshop model at the undergraduate level, or in most of today's graduate workshops, for that matter. The workshop model was not designed with undergraduates or the ruck of graduate students in mind. It was designed for gifted, elite writers who needed very little instruction, though they may have benefited from criticism on their manuscripts.

Wallace Stegner offers a succinct history of the workshop model in his 1988 book On the Teaching of Creative Writing. According to Stegner, methods used by Harvard professors Dean Le Baron Russell Briggs and Charles Townsend Copeland led directly to the establishment of the Breadloaf Writers' Conference, initially directed by...