When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think that, in principle, a workshop is such a beautiful idea - an environment in which writers who are collectively apprenticed to the craft of writing can come together in order to collectively improve.
Warrior Writer workshops have sprung up across the country, and of the ones I've attended and participated in, most contain at least one or two star writers.
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.
I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.
Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
I came to writing because I joined the North Clare Writers' Workshop, which met every week at Ennistymon Library.
I did not go to any creative writing workshop; I did not major in literature. If I can write, anyone can write. All it needs is imagination.
I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.