Poetry Workshop

Poetry has never been my strong suit. I typically don't understand anything about it from what it actually means to why I read it. However, during workshop, I felt a little more safe and a little less lost. Workshop was a time and place where I could finally ask questions and say things like "I just didn't get the last stanza" to the author of the poem. Workshop definitely helped in my overall all appreciation of poetry.

With that being said, the days riding up to the day my poem was to be workshopped were absolute torture. I suffered this irrational fear that after I read my poem, the class would just tell me how horrible it was and how I should just quit. Now, I say irrational fear because I knew in the back of my mind that nothing like this would happen and even if something remotely close to this happened I would just shrug it off, but still, when it came time to workshop my poem, I was fairly nervous. However, the workshop helped a lot while simultaneously didn't help. A lot of directly conflicting views on what to cut and what to keep made the revision process that much more annoying. Although, in all, it was very nice to have a "test group" try out my poem and tell me what they did and did not like.