‘Maybe that’s just the way I read it’: On the teaching of poetry writing
by Adrian Grafe
Billy Collins’s poem ‘Workshop’ envisions the persona as reading a poem that someone seems to have sent him; as he does so, the witty reflexiveness of the poem means that he creates a new poem out of his reading of the poem of his fellow-poet’s. For as the poem unfolds, one realises that everything it says about the friend’s poem is applicable to the poem one is reading: hence the comment on the friend’s poem’s fourth stanza occurs in the fourth stanza of ‘Workshop’, the comments on the middle and last stanzas occur in just those places in Collins’s poem. With its tongue in its cheek, the poem focuses on the difficulty – or supposed difficulty – of trying to be encouraging about a poem, perhaps a poem written during a workshop, that may not in fact be any good, with mock-apologetic phrases such as Maybe it’s just me or Maybe that’s just the way I read it standing as chorus lines.
My topic is the teaching of poetry writing both within and without university, but especially in creative writing workshops wherever they may be. I want to state from the outset that I don’t come at this from an academic or theoretical angle, to the extent that I have first-hand experience of taking part in poetry writing courses and workshops including Helen’s in this building, and, at university here and in Italy, of running them for students of English, and it is these experiences plus some reading that have shaped what thinking I can offer on them in a brief lapse of time. I want to see what some poets, and one character in a film, have to say concerning teaching and learning poetry writing.
My title could be said to beg the question from the outset as to what poetry is, or in particular what a poem is. How can one tell the difference between a text which is a poem and one which seems formally to be a poem but which may, as it were, miss the mark? Is it just a matter of instinct, intuition, or subjectivity, as Billy Collins’s phrase in the first part of my title suggests? It also raises the question of the teacher or tutor. Does the latter have to be a poet themselves? And if they do have to be a poet, is there anything to suggest that a poet must necessarily a good teacher of poetry writing, or even be able to teach it at all? The whole subject goes even further than this: what drives someone to write poetry in the first place? Can a writing workshop give them that drive if they don’t already have it? (In my experience, it can). But other questions immediately spring to mind: if we focus on the act of writing itself, shouldn’t we distinguish between the solitary setting in which writing takes place on the one hand, and the fact that by definition a workshop in which writing takes place is a social setting in which one cannot but be intensely aware of the presence of the other participants and the workshop leader?
And second: is it not worthwhile separating writing poetry from being a poet? In other words, a lot of people could come up with a poem (or two) if you pushed them, but would that be enough to make them poets? And the same can be said for AI: AI can write poems apparently indistinguishable from poems written by human beings, but does that make AI a poet?
Hermann Hesse’s essay On Poems criticises a certain kind of poem, what he calls in speechmarks “beautiful” poems:
Because “beautiful” poems make the poet beloved, a great quantity of poems come into the world that attempt nothing except to be beautiful, that pay no heed to the original primitive, holy, innocent function of poetry. These poems from the very start are made for others, for hearers, for readers. They are no longer dreams or dance steps or outcries of the soul, reactions to experience, stammered wish-images or magic formulas, gestures of a wise man or grimaces of a madman— they are simply planned productions, fabrications, pralines for the public. They have been made for distribution and sale and they serve to amuse or inspire or distract their buyers. So just this sort of poem finds approval. One does not have to project oneself seriously and lovingly into such poems, one is not tormented or shaken by them, rather one sways comfortably and pleasurably in time to their pretty, regular rhythms.
Hesse wrote these words over a hundred years ago, in 1918, and of course the world has up to a point changed since then, as has poetry. And Hesse may have been taking a dig at a certain school of poetry. But nevertheless, his essentially Platonic and therefore traditional view of poets and poems is a lasting one.
Hesse says here what he thinks poetry should be. He might have found some sort of answer in Keats’s letter to his publisher John Taylor of February 27th 1818: “it is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it – And this leads me to another axiom – That if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.” Keats’s stringent view of poetry would seem to leave little room for the teaching of poetry writing as a possible way for helping poetry to ‘come naturally’.
In Rilke’s first letter to the young poet, having given his admirer quite a bit of advice, he tells him: ‘No one can help you or give you advice, no one.’ But just after this very sentence, he does go on to give the young poet a criterion for writing poetry:
The only thing to do is: Go into yourself. Look for the reason that is making you write; see whether it has put down roots in the deepest place in your heart; admit, in all honesty, whether or not you would die if you weren’t allowed to write. This above all: Ask yourself, in your night’s quietest moment, Do I have to write? Dig deep down into yourself for the answer. And if it is yes, if you can meet this solemn question with a strong and simple “I must”, then build your life around that necessity.
This seems to me to be good teaching, and something the young poet might even have been able to work out for himself.
Poet and teacher Kathleen Spivack alludes to our topic in her memoir With Robert Lowell and His Circle (2012). Young poets such as Sylvia Plath, always prim and solemn, and Anne Sexton, attended Lowell’s poetry classes. Spivack offers extraordinarily vivid first-hand descriptions of Lowell’s (1917-1977) teaching methods which involved his handing out Xeroxed copies of poems by the budding poets in his class, inviting comments from the attendees, and offering his own. Sometimes he would barely comment on the poem at hand but thumb through a book of poetry, find a particular poem he was looking for, and give a detailed analysis of it. The attitude of participants at the workshop, who offered their creations up on the altar of sacrifice, seems to have been ambivalent: on the one hand they wanted to have the master’s comments on their work, on the other they were overawed by him and scared of what he might have to say about their writing. Spivack says that his most damning criticism was: “It’s a nice poem.” If he said that, they knew he thought it was bad. Well, at least he considered it was a poem. It is worthwhile adding that Lowell himself, a poet undeniably both accomplished and major, would frequently submit his poems to his contemporary, the poet Randall Jarrell, before publication.
Spivack writes about Lowell’s workshop:
We had heard of the Iowa Writing Workshop. But there was no such work-shop in the Northeast where poets could gather and devote themselves to the discipline of poetry. Poetry, it was felt, could not be “taught.” Lowell’s classes were known for the attempt, so poets came from all over to study with him.
As with Hesse’s description of so-called “beautiful” poems, one thing that stands out in Spivack’s approach to the topic is the speechmarks around the word “taught”. Is this because people used to use this kind of phrasing? Or is it to insist on the slight ridicule in which some people held the idea that poetry could be taught? Or does it simply suggest that to yoke together poetry writing and teaching was impossible—the best one could do was attempt it, as the next sentence suggests.
We again find punctuation arresting us when we turn to James Fenton’s An Introduction to English Poetry (2000). Fenton’s third chapter is entitled ‘The Training of the Poet’. He takes it for granted that ‘training and practice’ go into the making of a poet but what that training and practice might consist of compared to a musician or a painter for example, who will be able to learn as apprentices or from coaches, remains uncertain. An opera singer will have a voice coach, but will a poet have a poetry coach? Did Emily Dickinson give or take poetry tuition? Fenton says:
There are courses in creative writing, and some of these courses are taught by distinguished poets, and it may well suit some poets to sign on for the tuition. But to pretend that such teachers are the equivalent of, say, voice coaches, would be foolish.
Are we so sure it would be as foolish as Fenton claims? Why wouldn’t a creative writing teacher set an exercise, say, in poetic voice, or make suggestions for improving the voice of a given poem? Fenton’s italics here are a concession to his argument that a poet does not learn his craft or sullen art from a tutor. When it comes to the teaching of poetry writing, the punctuation used by Spivack and Fenton, and in a similar way by Hesse, suggests some kind of debatability if not embarrassment around the whole topic. Unlike Hesse, Fenton does not seem to consider the notion that poetry writing is something one does because one enjoys it. One point that Fenton makes concerns the assessment that the poet makes of his own poems. He says that the poet is never sure whether or not his work is any good, in the same way as a musician can either achieve Grade 8 on her chosen instrument, or if she is honest with herself, be able to say roughly whether her music is just good or, more than that, outstanding.
The apparent uncertainty around the whole question of quality, and therefore what criteria by which to establish what makes for quality or not, is linked in Billy Collins’s poem to that of subjectivity when it comes to evaluating other people’s verse. In this poem, the persona seems to be writing (or possibly speaking) his response to someone who has sent him a poem, perhaps for comment, someone who is not in the workshop. In line 2 we learn the persona is ‘in a workshop’, presumably a poetry writing workshop, and it is this which, according to the persona, enables him to as it were let fly in his assessment of his correspondent’s poem. The adverb ‘Maybe’ occurs five times altogether, always at the beginnings of lines: ‘Maybe it’s just me’, ‘Maybe it’s just the way I read it’. This is the preamble before putting the knife in. If I am to be, if me is to be, the sole criterion of evaluating the poem, well then, so be it, or should I say: maybe so be it? Perhaps we could call these remarks not back-handed compliments but back-handed criticisms.
The poet Hugo Williams is an experienced poetry workshop leader. He wrote in connection with one of his workshops:
The tricky thing about the creative writing industry is the more or less accepted notion that everyone’s opinion, even on matters of grammar, carries equal weight. You have to be incredibly diplomatic and charming. ‘Tap dancing’ I call it, but there is another word for it.
He manages to criticise a participant’s poem but the participant isn’t having any of it: “‘But WHY isn’t it any good?’ he howls.”
“Why indeed.” Williams goes on. “I want to know myself.” The other participants defend the poem, and the hapless Williams ends up doing a u-turn on the poem. The guilty participant says to him: “‘After all, it’s really just your word against mine, isn’t it?’ ‘Right,’ I whimper.” About a would-be poet’s poem which he, Williams, intensely dislikes, he writes: ‘My toes curl as I hand out the usual compliments.’ The people-pleasing buffoonish persona he describes seems light years away from Robert Lowell’s aloof, mandarin stance. At morning meetings at the personal development holidays on Skyros where he runs his poetry writing courses, Williams offers remarks he calls ‘conceited modesties’ about himself as a poetry writing teacher, referring to
some of the more conceited modesties I had tittered at the morning staff meetings. How I was not really a community type; how I was not really a teacher; I hadn’t even been to university; I knew nothing; how everything I knew about writing could be written on the back of a postage stamp; how writing wasn’t something you could teach anyway.
This is exactly the scepticism that James Fenton propounds about poetry writing courses.
The now familiar strategy of over-egging the pudding when it comes to punctuating one’s remarks on poetry writing teaching returns with a vengeance in another of Williams’s accounts of running poetry workshops, which confirms his student’s previous remark about one person’s opinion against another’s: “in a creative-writing ‘workshop’ everyone’s opinion on the subject is equally ‘valid’, and so I bow my head and swallow the dead metaphors.” The speechmarks on either side of ‘workshop’ and ‘valid’ require some interpretation: in relation to ‘workshop’, they could mean this is simply the jargon: so Williams is asking: is this the right word for what we do in these activities? And ‘valid’ meaning that again it is not his word, but again a sort of jargon for the absence or refusal of objective criteria of quality.
For my part I take Hugo Williams’s prose reports as both poetry and as poetry workshops. I feel like Frost seeing the poetry in Thomas’s prose. I see the poetry in Williams’s prose. His prose makes poetry writing look easy. He says students (as he calls them) at his workshops invariably overlook the question of writing prose, which Williams says is more poetic than poetry. By the way, he often disarmingly describes poetry as chopped-up prose: the point is to know where to put the line-breaks in. He also describes poetry writing as expressing yourself ‘of course’ but also as trying to find something out, as fine a definition as any.
My general experience is that when one is confronted with a group of budding poets who each read out their work in turn, there seems to be some sort of intuitive quality detector which enables one to sense almost immediately that a given member of that group has a flair for poetry writing. The experience of taking part in a poetry workshop is thus humbling since there is inevitably someone in the group who clearly writes better than one does oneself. Better simply to learn: comparisons rarely instruct and often depress.
Both Rilke and Hesse suggest forgetting the search for approval, and just writing. They do not exactly give a version of Sidney’s ‘“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.”’ But close enough, perhaps. ‘Poetry isn’t outside; it is inside, within,’ says Attilio, the main character in Roberto Benigni’s 2005 film The Tiger and the Snow. Although he is a poet in his use of language and way of being, Attilio does not claim to be a poet. He does however take a poetry writing class, though he talks so volubly the class runs out of time without anybody getting down to writing a poem. Nevertheless his advice seems poetic enough: ‘Don’t start writing love poetry. It is the hardest. Wait till you are 80. Write about something else: the sea, the wind, a radiator, a train running late … nothing is more poetic than any other thing. (…)To convey happiness you must be happy. To convey sadness, you must be happy. To be happy, you must suffer! Don’t be scared of suffering! Everyone suffers! If you don’t have the means, don’t worry. Only one thing is necessary to make poetry: everything.’
In the end it would be possible to argue that if you can teach someone how to write a poem, it is more difficult to teach them how to be a poet. Nevertheless, if they are taught hard and willing to learn, they may after all end up becoming a poet. Hermann Hesse ends his essay On Poems with a piece of advice. He argues that some readers may get fed up with reading ‘beautiful’ poems, the classics, because they may ‘strike you as a little bit censored, a little bit castrated, all too well approved, all too tame…’ He suggests that in this case the reader will turn to reading bad poems. ‘But this is always a short-term pleasure; you quickly get enough of it.’ So what to do? Anyone can write bad poems. His advice is, rather than to carry on reading bad poems, to write poems oneself : ‘Try it sometime, and you will find that making bad poems actually gives much more pleasure than reading even the most beautiful ones.’
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Benigni, Roberto (2005). The Tiger and the Snow (La tigre e la neve). Screenplay. https://www.scripts.com/script/the_tiger_and_the_snow_21907/2
Collins, Billy (1995), The Art of Drowning, University of Pittsburgh Press.
Fenton, James (2003), An Introduction to English Poetry, London: Penguin (2002).
Hesse, Hermann (1979), My Belief, Theodore Kiolkowski (ed.), trans. Denver Lindley, Ralph Manheim, St Albans: Triad/Panther (1974).
Rilke, Rainer Maria (2020), Letters to a Young Poet. With the Letters to Rilke from the “Young Poet”, Franz Xaver Kappus, trans. Damian Searles, New York, London: Liveright.
Spivack, Kathleen (2012), With Robert Lowell and His Circle, Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Williams, Hugo (1995), Freelancing: Adventures of a Poet, London: Faber & Faber.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
The LOOP team, Adrian Grafe (10 décembre 2025). ‘Maybe that’s just the way I read it’: On the teaching of poetry writing. LOOP. Consulté le 9 février 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/15bdy

