/lit/ - Literature

>>6185897
>kid wishes for a baseball to be in his hand
>it appears inside his hand and displaces all the bones and skin

My professor's syllabus for poetry workshop this semester.

>You may be accustomed to a prescriptive workshop or a workshop in which the student’s instructor and peers provide feedback regarding what is “working” or “not working” in a poem/story and then recommend specific changes.

>This isn’t that kind of workshop. We won’t be doing that. We will not be evaluating the writer’s work and telling her what we like and what she can fix. Instead we will be describing the writer’s work and telling her what we see, what choices we feel define the poem.

>Some writers find the adjustment to a descriptive workshop to be slightly uncomfortable. They want to know what they need to do to fix the poem. Or they really want to tell their classmates what they need to do to fix their poems. But poems aren’t broken. They aren’t cars that won’t start. Each poem is a strange and unique machine*. Our job is to give each machine’s builder as much information as we can regarding what we believe this machine is doing and what we believe this machine can ultimately do.

Thoughts?