Sudeep Sen writes:
My very first poetry workshop was way back in 1986. That was also my first year abroad as a student at Davidson College in the States. Frankly, I was quite amused to see a creative writing workshop being offered as part of the legitimate English literature curriculum. So I told myself, this is easy, write poems (which I did anyway) and get a literature course credit for it. I also had the typical Indian bias as regards writing at the time -- how can one teach you how to write poems, you either have it in you or you don't.
I remember the first day of the workshop led by Anthony Abbott, a fine poet and critic, entering the classroom and telling us, "Look, I'm here as a fellow writer-colleague and not as a teacher ... let's all write together". There was something deeply warm, inclusive, and modest about the comment. Here is someone, an highly acclaimed academic and poet, making us feel completely at ease with his humility.
What I remember of that workshop now is that he didn't necessarily teach me how to write poetry, but he certainly made me read a lot of contemporary poetry, pointed me in interesting directions that I would not normally have ventured into, taught the finer points of craft, form, technic, and most importantly, he became one of my best friends through poetry.
I have since, sometimes hesitantly, been part of occasional workshops in the USA and UK. Depending on the participant's willingness to be honest and acuteness of criticism, it may or may not be profitable. It also depends on what one uses workshops for. Some people use it to get their incipient ideas straightened out, for others it is a therapeutic support group.
For me, more often than not, I took poems that I had worked on fairly hard, revising and editing it, honing it down, try to strip away as much fat as one could. So really, I looked for sharp fine tuned comments -- things that absolutely did not make sense, points where the syllabic beat are just slightly off, the effect of shape and form, music and language itself.
Often I find that there are people who dominate workshops showing off the their extent of reading and knowledge spiced with trendy catch phrases, but concentrating very little on the text at hand. For me, the workshop poem is simply a piece of authorless text that needs to work in some form or the other. Therefore, one can then proceed with adjusting the STP conditions, the torque, the wattage, weight, colour and texture, and that is where it gets useful. However, I suppose that is asking for too much. Also in Western context, I often find criticism severely limited, prompted largely by a white Eurocentric construct, as if the 80% of the world did not exist. Indeed if it did, it often gets reduced to pathetic exotica.
I find one-on-one readings of large amounts of texts quite useful. There one can uncomfortably, but challengingly immerse oneself and learn not only new things from the other person, but if one is lucky, provide an invisible iota of suggestion to the other to improve or look at things, maybe in a slightly altered way.
Ultimately, it is ones own honesty and spaciousness of the imagination, and the fact that one can trust ones readers (not necessarily from the so-called literati) that provides me with private comfort