How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers’ group that you work ideas and poems with?
About fifteen years ago (oh my!), back in the days of listservs, I was fortunate to be involved in a workshop group that met through Annie Finch’s WomPo listserv. They were then and still are phenomenal poets, all of them very well known now.
I learned a great deal from these women, many of whom are still working together in the same way. But after a few years, I began to think that too much of my editing process seemed to more of a kind of homogenizing process. Not that our work became interchangeable, but that there did seem to be some unifying style aspects that bordered almost on being a “school”. At the time I thought I wasn’t fitting in well because I was the only member who wasn’t living in America. Or that it had something to do with the fact that I was one of two who didn’t have a university teaching career. Or that I was a bit younger than the others. Of course, it’s entirely possible that they will just always be better poets than I am, but I think it was time for me to be true to my own ear.
These days my husband is my first reader. He isn’t a native English speaker, so he’s never had an inclination to try to rewrite my melodies or suggest tinkering with tone. But since he is someone who reads and loves literature, if he finds something mysterious or confusing in a poem – well, I know that I need to give it a hard look. Did I leave something vital out? (My editing process is almost always a matter of addition not subtraction.)
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