Poets Only Discussion on Finding Guideposts for Your Writing: Post-Session Thoughts
March 3, 2025
Discussion Chat:
13:05:12 From Kol to Everyone:
http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/2007/06/on-difficulty-in-poetry.html
13:10:32 From Michele to Everyone:
Speaking of games, here is something a presenter shared recently. It’s a dice game that helps come up with ideas and topics https://www.metaphordice.com/
13:40:32 From Meg Hartmann to Everyone:
Michael LaRonn Indy Poet Rockstar
13:44:03 From Kol to Everyone:
https://www.emilysernaker.com/your-favorite-poets-favorite-poet-anthology-and-curriculum
13:44:49 From Ann Y (she/any) to Everyone:
https://screenwritingtricksforauthors.com/
13:54:38 From Meg Hartmann to Everyone:
Lauren Haldeman
13:56:18 From Ann Y (she/any) to Everyone:
https://www.instagram.com/laurenhaldeman/
*
I had some additional thoughts in response to Kol’s question about what I myself learned from going through the Guideposts process.
First, as you might imagine, the most important realizations came before putting together the talk, and the talk and the exercises were me thinking about how I might help someone else have similar realizations: what questions do I wish I had earlier to help me learn things faster? A lot of the Identity section came from realizing that a major differentiator compared to other poets I’ve taken workshops with has been my willingness to play around and experiment, especially with getting off the page and trying more sculptural, three-dimensional forms. The result has been a clearer idea of my own project and with that clarity has come a greater confidence (the confidence that comes from knowing the ground on which you’re standing).
The “writer biography” exercise brought me a lot of insights, too many to get into in a relatively brief response (and some of them maybe more about therapy and self-forgiveness rather than the writing itself). Thinking about how my writing interests evolved makes clearer for me some different impulses that tug at me in my work now. Though I’m no longer the “love poet” I was at 15, 30 years later some of those same impulses are there…so when that autobiographical urge comes up, how can I apply what I’ve learned since then to go further than I could have as a teenager? Tapping into what originally led me to write long ago can give me access to the fresh mind and energy of the beginner: why did this matter so much in the first place?
I think what I took most from the Audience section was greater clarity that the people who matter most for my work are those who have the same experimental sense of play. Early in January, after I had recorded the talk and was finishing the workbook, I happened to strike up a conversation with a man in a coffee shop who it turned out also wrote poetry and was a fan of Robert Frost (who to be clear I think is a poet one can learn a lot from, and worthwhile for anyone who enjoys his poems). He asked me about my work and I described being more on the experimental end and he made a disapproving comment about “trickery” and “not considering the audience.” I felt that the thinking I had just finished about audience helped me do much better at keeping these comments in perspective as just his point of view, and kept them from triggering insecurity as much as they might have at an earlier time.
Finally, the section on Time has helped me let go of the obligation I’ve felt towards certain projects that have been lingering as possibilities, but that I now know aren’t a major priority. I can see more clearly that at the moment at least, they’re distractions from what I really should be doing.
*
Re: The comments I had remembered from the musician on imitation (it was Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows)–I found the interview and it was a little different from what I remembered on the call. I don’t think he’s discouraging imitation so much as he’s discouraging the idea of measuring what you create against other artists and viewing success only as how well you’re able to reproduce what they do (as opposed to finding and nurturing your own voice and style). Here’s the link to the interview and the relevant excerpt:
Interviewer:
Recently just before the pandemic I finally read The Sun Also Rises and that just completely altered the way I could perceive a book in the sense that nothing actually happens in the book but there’s so much going on with these people just because they’re dealing with so much that it just completely altered my reality. I recently recommended that book to a lady friend of mine, and she also had the same kind of reaction so that idea of, like, that short prose being so just powerful. When you first started writing did you kind of look over all of that, all this music you’re listening to, and say, “I want to do that” or did you make a conscious effort to say “Well, I want to carve out my own identity first.”
AD:
Well, I think when you first start out, you’re copying other people. That’s the first thing you have to get rid of is that idea that you have to sound like something else to be good. I remember that, like the first when I listened to some of our early demo stuff — the songs I left off that I didn’t even want to record for the first record — some of them are just … because that sounds like a Peter Gabriel song that sounds like I’m copying this (…) like at first what you think is good is if it sounds like somebody good, and you have to get rid of that really quickly, you know, otherwise it’s a bad crutch.
–Meg