it's been a while but I feel like today's event was a significant occurrence. Today I took a one day master class with Li Young Lee. It was a class of 12 poets from different backgrounds and it all happened at the asian american writers workshop. What was so special about today besides the fact that Li young doesn't teach at a university and rarely if ever does writing workshops, was that he was amazingly insightful. The class began by everyone picking one poem to workshop, after reading the poem yourself and then having someone else read it, he and everyone else would comment on it. That is nothing unusual but what was extremely interesting and helpful was the exposition that he would give about poetry itself. He would talk about what poetry should be and in many ways what the poet has to be. It changed my outlook about poetry completely. He would constantly throw out these beautifully carved philosophical outlooks on poetry. He talked about poetry being a negotiation between the probable and the random. Form and chaos. If a poem starts out in a form like a villanelle or sestina then it must find the balance by being more original in its expressions than a poem in free verse. He said that words are like the hearts of clouds magnetizing other words into bonded correlations. That a poems medium is not the page or the language but the mind of the audience. It was amazing and really has me re-examining my approach to memory and rhyme, poetry itself. I would say more but I haven't processed it all. It was a very god day, worth every penny.
