Taking Poetry Classes

In 2011 I started taking poetry classes at the Twin Cities Loft Literary Center.

In that first class I tried to write witness poems like Carolyn Forche's amazing poem, "The Colonel"-- scattered severed ears.

Regardless of "subject matter" these [witness] poems bear the traces of extremity within them, and are as, such, evidence of what occurred - Milos Radnoti's "Picture Postcards," at least partly written while waiting to be executed by firing squad. 

Radnoti's vital juices stained the manuscript.

Most of the poems in Against Forgetting deal with wartime atrocity.

I had no such witness-worthy experience, and so I wrote dire poems that didn't work.

In later Loft classes, I completed the class assignments, but I wrote more and better apart from the class.

I think I've almost never kept anything I wrote for a poetry class, with the exception of the "Pueblo" sequence that I wrote for that first class in 2011 and posted on the Google blog that I started that same year.

I invariably talked too much in class. 

I wonder, if I again took a class, would I shut up and listen more?

If not, I wouldn't derive enough benefit to make the class worthwhile for me.

Starting in 2015, I took several online classes from Canadian poet, Pearl Pirie. 

Pearl's classes revolutionized the way I write--from prosy free verse to minimalist or syllabic forms (I'd already made hundreds of 5-7-5 haiku based on heard snatches of speech), and eventually to traditional forms such as sonnet and villanelle.

Instead of war-time atrocity, the witnessed "subject matter" can be every-day joy in my own physical existence. 

Each Yokel poem bears witness of the day it was written, and each book of Yokel poems is ordered chronologically by composition date.

I feel that the poems' association of the with specific dates of experienced time makes the Yokel poems a kind of "witness poem"--referring as they do to contemporaneous events such as COVID, the George Floyd demonstrations, the 2020 presidential election and associated events, etc.