“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.” From Howards End by E. M. Forster
Writing poems is a solitary act. You occasionally hear about collaborations. For instance, Marvin Bell and William Stafford exchanged poems back and forth which led to their book Segues: A Correspondence in Poetry, but such happenings are rare. Still, for me, once a poem is in decent shape, my impulse is to share it with other writers and get some feedback. I generally sense that more work is needed, and that’s where writing groups come in.
In an earlier Substack, I wrote about my graduate student friends in Iowa City. Marvin Bell called us “The Clique,” and it was basically an informal club. We didn’t just talk poetry. We went to movies together, took some of the same classes, and occasionally drove as a group to Cedar Rapids to get a decent meal. (Back then Iowa City’s one so-called Chinese restaurant served Chow Mein out of tin cans.)
For a decade or so after Iowa I was mainly working on my own. I tried my hand at fiction and got an agent, but had no takers for the two novels I completed. But my poetry was more successful, coming out in some of the top magazines, including Poetry and The New Yorker, and winning the Discovery Award of the New York Poetry Center. In 1980, I published my first book, The Bone-Duster in the Quarterly Review of Literature poetry series.
In 1984-85, I had a sabbatical-year off from the University of Alaska and took it in Cambridge, Mass. We had two kids by then and found a suitable apartment in a building where, so we were told, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had spent the previous year. We didn’t run into him, or any sign of him, but we did run into a lot of cockroaches, and had to vacate the apartment for a day while it was fumigated.
Still, being in Cambridge was exhilarating and I was anxious to connect with some local writers. So I dropped by Grolier, the poetry bookstore, to see if I could make any contacts, and there, taped to the front window, was a note announcing that a local writers group was looking for new members. “Must have book or significant journal publications,” it said and it gave a phone number. I called and introduced myself and was invited to attend the next meeting. It was as simple as that and it made my year.
Members of the group included Martha Collins, Pam Alexander, and several others whose work I’d come across in magazines. It met once every three weeks and was hosted by the members on a rotating basis. The host provided snacks, beer, and coffee. Coming up with a draft every three weeks fit the pace I usually work at. The group had high standards, and it gave me a push. Here’s a poem I wrote that year. The speaker is a seventeen-year-old Russian girl who faces starvation (trigger warning) during the German onslaught in World War II.
THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD, 1941-42 How boring at seventeen to have responsibilities! My little brother plays with boxes. Mother and Aunt lie in the cold back room too heavy to move. I keep it closed because I know a rat has visited their faces. Last June when our German friends decided to pay a call, I curled at my rooftop post like a cat staring into a bowl. The blimps overhead were strange white fish. In the light that crept across the pole, my friends and I read Pushkin. At times it felt like me drifting over the streets, each roof, each silvery spire in the midnight glow engraving a past that was learning to slowly disappear. There are no cats left in Leningrad. Some dogs are sausage, some stew. All the men away at the front the trolley tracks run to—but no trains run. My daily slice has sawdust filler. Chewing on wood, on leather, I think of caviar, those salt-sweet jellies, but this girl's belly holds only the melted snow I tease the gnawing hours with. Forget the noise and smoke—as if everything you couldn't eat had turned combustible—compared with starving, bombs are just a joke. What poet said history is sister to hysteria? Thank God, mother will never see what happens next. Oh, Grief's a baby! I saw him in the night. He was all white, his arms up over his head in panic, as if he couldn't breathe. And as I reached to help he fell down dead. Last January I refused to pull my brother on his sled. Now there's no reason to refuse. One by one I've watched the others go. The roads are rutted, trees on either side, white and fruitless. Coming out of town, I saw a hill. Closer—a leg cut off at the knee, some frosted hair. It was a mountain of bodies jutting into the sky. Thousands strewn around the cemetery gate, no one strong enough to hack their holes in the frigid ground. So many deaths can hardly be serious! And now, tottering back, I watch the others—those exhausted, dutiful faces—shoving coffins, dragging shrouded sleds, stumbling, weak like me. One of them dropped in the snow: pale blue skin over the bones of her cheek. And gazing into her beautiful green glazed eyes, like shells, there is no way to tell which of us is living, which dead.
You can never be certain just how good a poem is but it helps if it wins a prize. “The Siege of Leningrad, 1941-42” was awarded second prize in the Denver Quarterly poetry contest, judged by Jorie Graham.
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After my sabbatical year, I came back to Fairbanks looking for a writing group. And I found one. It was a set of friends that included poets and prose writers, most of whom were my colleagues at the University of Alaska or our former students. It’s been going for many years now, and though we used to meet in person, since Covid we’ve carried on via Zoom. This makes it less intimate but has the advantage that when members happen to be out of town they can still take part.
When you form a writers group it’s important that everyone be at roughly the same level. If the levels are too mixed, there will be compatibility issues. People will have different standards, and a work that looks amateurish to an advanced writer may be given high praise by members who are just starting out. Unearned praise is not what you’re looking for. You want an honest appraisal of your work, including recommendations for things to cut or reword and suggestions about whatever else may be needed to make it a finished poem. You want a group with members who will push you, not one made up of people who don’t take their writing very seriously. The meetings should try to fit in a discussion of each submitted work, but unless the group is quite large, there will be usually time left over to talk about other things, so the members should be compatible socially.
When I’m dealing with feedback from the group, one rule for me is that if a single person objects to a line, I’ll think about making a change, but the change is optional. However if two people object to the same passage, something needs to be done. And when I’m revising, I keep Marriane Moore’s advice in mind: if a passage keeps causing problems, take it out.
And one further point about the members of a writing group. You will quickly learn the varied tastes of your cohort. For example, one member may favor surreal or Ashbery-like poems, while another prefers down to earth personal lyrics, and a third favors politically-aware subjects like ecopoetry or feminism. But just because you may have different affinities doesn’t mean that you should discount their comments. Rather, they can help you expand your range.
Another issue can come up with members who shy away from saying anything critical. These folks may be excellent writers themselves, but they’re reluctant critics. In such cases you’ll have to read between the lines. When they’re praising a rough draft, you need to take any hesitation as a possible point of criticism. These are the places to look at for revision.
As I mentioned earlier in this piece, there have been periods in my life when I’ve worked on my own. If you’re comfortable writing in isolation, that’s fine. Just be aware that without any feedback you may be heading down a rabbit hole, as I was with those two unpublished novels. At a minimum keep reading your contemporaries and sending your work out to magazines. There’s a paradox here. Writing poems is a private act. It requires that we explore our inner selves looking for insights, but when we surface again we have to be able to communicate our discoveries. The inner world leads us to our subjects but the outer world provides an audience, and it’s our job as poets to make them connect.
Thanks.
That poem. Very 17.