Genre: Poetry

On June 20, poet Diane Wakoski read with the Woodward Line Poetry Series at the Scarab Club in Detroit. Series coordinator Kim Hunter writes about her visit.

To get to Detroit’s Scarab Club art gallery, Diane Wakoski drove ninety miles to from East Lansing, Michigan, where she has been Michigan State University’s Poet in Residence and a professor since 1975. By the time you read this, she will have retired, capping an illustrious academic career. 

She also capped the 2011–2012 season for the Woodward Line Poetry Series, which runs from September through June. The decade-old series takes place in the century-old Scarab Club art gallery. The lower floor, where the reading took place, is an airy, brilliant white space with wooden floors. Wakoski read in front of a five-foot-long painting of a rooster and managed not to be upstaged.

The crowd of about thirty people ranged from college-aged attendees to fans who’d been following Wakoski’s work for decades. Though most seemed familiar at least with Wakoski’s longstanding reputation, if not her many publications, Wakoski’s reading style and ability to frame her work would have provided an excellent introduction to even the most poetry-phobic.

In addition, all of the evening’s selections were about films. She began the reading by noting the irony of having been born in southern California, but not having become interested in movies until she moved to New York and saw a French New Wave film by Jean-Luc Godard. It was then that she realized film could be art (another irony, since Hollywood inspired the French New Wave). Part of the publicity for the reading included a video posting of her paean to Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (read by a Canadian radio host). 

During the question and answer session that followed the reading, I asked her if she saw any parallels between the structure of her very visual work and the structure of film. She replied that it was more that she liked films that were like her poems: films where the plot was merely a means to draw the audience into something deeper. Indeed, though her work referenced pop culture throughout the evening, she always moved deeper, as with “Beauty And The Beast,” to themes of desire and how we deceive ourselves with it and for it.

Photo: Diane Wakoski. Credit: Kim Hunter.
Support for Readings/Workshops events in Detroit is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

For the past seven years, Nancy Kline has been leading P&W–supported senior writing workshops at Queens Community House in New York City. Her short stories, essays, literary criticism, and translations have appeared widely. She is the author of the novel, The Faithful, and edited and contributed to the essay collection How Writers Teach Writing. She also reviews regularly for the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Kline generously shared with us reflections on her writing workshops with seniors.

What makes your workshops unique?
It’s the students who make my workshops unique—their jokes, epiphanies, reticencies, and idiosyncrasies; their chemistry with each other, with me, and with words. 

Could you share a few examples of stories written in your workshop recently?
In one workshop, we used pieces from Flash Fiction Forward as springboards into workshop participants’ own work.

Rick Moody’s “Drawer” inspired a hilarious description of the anarchic contents of one writer’s drawer and her increasing hysteria as she searched through it for some coveted item.

In response to the prompt "just like her mother," suggested by Pamela Painter's "Toasters," one workshop participant wrote about how, as a small child, she accompanied her mother to forage secretly for an apronful of grain with which to feed her starving family in decimated, post-World War II Germany.

Rob Carney's “Traveling Alone” inspired one eighty-six-year-old student's biblical monologue. When asked what she planned to write about next, having just done God, she replied: “Sex.” And so she did.

What techniques do you employ to help shy writers open up?
In my experience, all writers are shy, at least on some level. We are naked in the page. For this reason, I try to establish a respectful, attentive environment in my writing workshops. Laughter helps.

I try to teach students to listen to their readers’ comments, without defensiveness or undue docility, and to comment on other people’s work with rigor and charity; to write any written comments in pencil, rather than pen; and to try to phrase their comments as questions, rather than statements. 

There’s a difference between asking a writer "Could you clarify this?" and stamping a text "Unclear." The former recognizes that the writer is in charge of her own words and has the power to change them. The latter suggests, to my ear, that the reader is in charge and the writer has failed.

What has been your most rewarding experience as a teacher?
It is always that moment when a student gets it, whatever it happens to be. Sometimes a writer who has been struggling with constricted prose suddenly writes in a text so lush and genuine that the workshop falls silent in admiration. Smaller epiphanies occur: During a recent session on comma use, one of the seniors exclaimed, “Commas actually communicate information! I never knew that!” This was thrilling.

What affect has this work had on you?
It is deeply moving to be in the presence of the accumulated wisdom, imagination, and courage of the women and men with whom I’m working. Four of my students have died since I began to offer these workshops. Their deaths have marked me and their colleagues, and have underlined the collective sense that each of us has many stories to tell, and that we had better hurry up and tell them.

Photo: Nancy Kline. Credit: Adam Piore.
Support for Readings/Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, and Friends of Poets & Writers.