
Nick DePascal: You’re Not Stupid
You’re Not Stupid: A Student Perspective on Workshop and Critique
Over the past two to three years, my biggest struggle and stumbling block as a poet has been over the issues surrounding difficulty and accessibility. How much do I want to reveal? How close do I want to play my cards to my chest? How can I achieve clarity without sacrificing originality in terms of voice, tone and content? Certainly, these questions have been most helpfully raised by fellow students in graduate level writing workshops. However, as we wander through each other’s poems, attempting to discover and understand what makes each other’s poems tick, identifying themes and obsessions, and yes, struggles, there are always moments when one another’s poems become simply unintelligible and beyond the grasp of our emotional and intellectual experiences and tendencies. It’s at these moments that the poet in question needs most to hear the confusion and questions of his or her readers.
As readers we can all quibble about particular line breaks, image strength, and word choice, but the biggest and yet most delicate part of the workshop comes when a poem fails to register interest with its readers. It’s good for a poet to know, especially in a workshop setting, if readers are having difficulty accessing a poem, and typically if one person is having the issue, others are as well. Yet when it comes time for us to critique the poem, most readers are overly cautious in addressing their outright inability to “get” the poem, and will at times gloss over this inaccessibility. Which leads me to perhaps my greatest pet peeve as both a writer and reader in a workshop – when someone utters some variation of that self-effacing phrase: “Maybe I’m just stupid, but…” Or, “I think this just went over my head.” Instead of engaging the poem, along with all its attendant problems, head on, the utterer of this phrase chooses to take the easy way out, which incidentally is detrimental to the poet’s ability to listen, learn and hopefully revise.
If you don’t “get” a poem, you’re not stupid. This feeling of not-gettingness occurs when whatever experience being put forth in the poem is difficult to connect with emotionally or intellectually. Perhaps the poem puts forth a situation or event you’ve never experienced in life, and the way it’s rendered would only make sense to someone who has experienced it firsthand? Perhaps you have experienced the situation in the poem firsthand and feel it negatively addresses your own experience. Perhaps the poem is muddled by imagery both beautiful and mixed or confusing (a sin of mine)? Perhaps the lines are too long? Too short? Perhaps the sentences are too long, leading breathless building of images and metaphors that sometimes lead nowhere (also a sin of mine)? None of this makes the reader who doesn’t connect to the poem stupid, or render their opinion invalid. In fact, it puts more responsibility on that particular reader to try and explicate what is and isn’t working in the poem, and what it is that keep them out, for accessibility is an issue all poets wrestle with, whether they admit it or not. The responsible reader and critic in the workshop will attempt to couch this inability to connect as a useful critique for the poet, and try to locate what about the poem inhibits their understanding of it. Are the images too abstract, or seemingly at odds with what seems to be at stake in the poem? Is there a lack of centering or grounding location in the poem? Are you unsure of what emotion is being presented in the poem? It’s ultimately up to the poet to decide and how they want to make the poem more accessible, based on the criticism received, but simply copping out as a reader and critic deprives the poet of even that opportunity, and is unhelpful as a critique.
Nick DePascal’s poetry appears in LAR Issue 10, October 2011.