'Let me confess...'

 'Very few people can write poetry,' I opined. 'And he [the subject under discussion, who will remain anonymous] sure ain't one of them.' Actually I'll modify that assertion: very few people can write poetry that anyone in their right mind would want to read. All too many people are writing poetry, or something that can pass for it, and even doing so very competently – but who in their right mind, etc? The internet has massively encouraged people to write poetry, regardless of ability or aptitude – and there are other factors that have been at work much longer, notably the poetry workshop and the creative writing course. I recently came across two poems written by battle-scarred veterans of that particular field of endeavour. Here is Dana Gioia, who has had enough of sestinas (and writes one to say as much):

My Confessional Sestina

Let me confess. I’m sick of these sestinas
written by youngsters in poetry workshops
for the delectation of their fellow students,
and then published in little magazines
that no one reads, not even the contributors
who at least in this omission show some taste.

Is this merely a matter of personal taste?
I don’t think so. Most sestinas
are such dull affairs. Just ask the contributors
the last time they finished one outside of a workshop,
even the poignant one on herpes in that new little magazine
edited by their most brilliant fellow student.

Let’s be honest. It has become a form for students,
an exercise to build technique rather than taste
and the official entry blank into the little magazines—
because despite its reputation, a passable sestina
isn’t very hard to write, even for kids in workshops
who care less about being poets than contributors.

Granted nowadays everyone is a contributor.
My barber is currently a student
in a rigorous correspondence school workshop.
At lesson six he can already taste
success having just placed his own sestina
in a national tonsorial magazine.

Who really cares about most little magazines?
Eventually not even their own contributors
who having published a few preliminary sestinas
send their work East to prove they’re no longer students.
They need to be recognised as the new arbiters of taste
so they can teach their own graduate workshops.

Where will it end? This grim cycle of workshops
churning out poems for little magazines
no one honestly finds to their taste?
This ever-lengthening column of contributors
scavenging the land for more students
teaching them to write their boot camp sestinas?

Perhaps there is an afterlife where all contributors
have two workshops, a tasteful little magazine, and sexy students
who worshipfully memorise their every sestina.

Gioia's barber is taking a correspondence course in poetry – and in this poem, Galway Kinnell writes as an instructor on such a course, who, like Gioia, has also had enough:

The Correspondence-School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students

Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me   

snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting   

you were beautiful; goodbye,

Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain   

brown envelopes for the return of your very

“Clinical Sonnets”; goodbye, manufacturer   

of brassieres on the Coast, whose eclogues

give the fullest treatment in literature yet

to the sagging breast motif; goodbye, you in San Quentin,   

who wrote, “Being German my hero is Hitler,”   

instead of “Sincerely yours,” at the end of long,   

neat-scripted letters extolling the Pre-Raphaelites:

I swear to you, it was just my way   

of cheering myself up, as I licked

the stamped, self-addressed envelopes,   

the game I had of trying to guess   

which one of you, this time,   

had poisoned his glue. I did care.   

I did read each poem entire.   

I did say everything I thought   

in the mildest words I knew. And now,

in this poem, or chopped prose, no better,   

I realize, than those troubled lines   

I kept sending back to you,

I have to say I am relieved it is over:

at the end I could feel only pity

for that urge toward more life

your poems kept smothering in words, the smell   

of which, days later, tingled in your nostrils   

as new, God-given impulses

to write.

Goodbye,

you who are, for me, the postmarks again

of imaginary towns—Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell—

their solitude given away in poems, only their loneliness kept.

And here is a wonderfully wry piece by Kay Ryan, overcoming a lifelong aversion to all forms of co-operative creative endeavour and attending, for the first time, an AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programmes Annual Conference). The session she gets the most from is on... The Contemporary Sestina!