How to: Feedback, Originality, & Ownership in Poetry Workshops with Matthew Caley (part 2)

In this series, we interview our tutors about poetry and its place in their world. These interviews will cover creative writing tips, excelling in a poetry workshop, building a literary career, and finding your poetic voice. Here’s part 2 of Matthew Caley discussing feedback, originality & ownership in workshops.

You can read part 1 of this interview here.

Can you share an experience where feedback enhanced your work without compromising your originality? 

Yes. As mentioned, I showed the initial manuscript of my 5th book Rake to my friend and former Editor Andy Ching. [This is before the process of sending it to my actual editor]. A month or so later I travelled to see him and he’d basically cut the book in half. My work can tend towards an exaggerated ‘hyper-aesthetic’ and ‘hyper-associative’ quality that over a stretch can prove wearying to anyone but the strongest reader. Andy’s ‘cut’ was like showing me two sides of a lopped melon. I could examine the insides, and the seeds and the flesh, much more clearly.

Of course, initially, I was ‘defensive’ [in a delightful way, of course] but then saw that the dynamics of my books, the sequencing, the secret structures, had to be much more carefully handled to mitigate this impression of their being ‘too much’. Even though the information overload of the 21st Century is partly what I’m representing and working out of. This led to as much work going into the architecture of the entire books, and dynamics between poems, and sections, and shared lines in poems, across the whole book, which, whilst being made up of individual poems, was also one, big, dynamic poem. Not a ‘concept’ but an ‘aesthetic arrangement’. Subsequent books have gone deeper and deeper into this, which has become,

I guess, a Caley ‘trait’ and part of my aesthetic.

How do you differentiate between feedback that is constructive and helps improve your poem, and feedback that might lead you away from your original idea or voice? 

A key question I think.

The standard poetry workshop is the ‘single poem critique’. Each poet has a single poem examined and the entire group, and tutor, offer up their critiques of it and make suggestions for improvement. There’s great, collective strength in this, which is why it is the standard form.

However, it also has limitations. One being the risk that any group may [consciously or unconsciously], just through the fact of it being ‘group-think’, be driving each poem through these ‘improvements’ into a more conventional or ‘safe’ poem, or one that fits the current zeitgeist, away from the poem’s original qualities.

In other words, what the poet/poem is doing ‘wrong’ can sometimes contain the best possibility for originality, if furthered and practiced more consciously. Correction of these ‘wrongs’ risks smothering their potential originality.

It’s mainly the tutor’s role, I think, to keep an eye on this ‘conventionalising’ tendency, if it exists in a group, and to try to sort out what is just plain ‘wrong’ and what is ‘wrong but with potential to be right’.

The single poem should always be seen, not merely for its own, contained traits, but as a symptom for a potential on-going aesthetic trajectory. I’m always saying to emergent poets, “write 15 more along that line!”. The tendency is to stay within that ‘single, occasional’ poem mode, safely ‘solve’ that particular poem, leave it behind, start again with another single poem and not see it as just one stop on an over-arching aesthetic.

It’s the same with exercises. Students, particularly early on, often do their best work if set an exercise. It brings out things in their approach that were hidden before. But they rarely go on to set themselves such exercises, or do many more than one response to the exercise, to fold back in what they’ve achieved in the exercise into their own work. They might let this seep in over a very long time but they rarely practice this every day. An athlete or a musician has to – whether or not they’re going to achieve what they want to achieve. It’s no different in poetry. But often the ‘one-off exercisers’ go back to what they were doing before, and the exercise poem sticks out like a sore thumb amongst their poems.

Therefore, workshop sessions, at the right moment, should be devised to go beyond one poem into sequences, or long poems, or looking at a body of work. And ultimately, a strong student might want to leave the single-poem type of workshop and switch to one-to-one mentoring, where they are getting a much wider over-view of their aesthetic development.

Aesthetic development being a far more important goal, I think, than achieving a single poem.

Matthew Caley’s 7th collection, To Abandon Wizardry, is published by Bloodaxe in November 2023. Since his debut, Thirst [Slow Dancer, 1999] was nominated for The Forward Prize for Best First Collection, his work has been widely anthologised and appeared in many magazines, websites and journals. He has given many readings both here and abroad. 

Matthew is running two Summer Seminar sessions with us in London, starting on Wednesday 23 July. These sessions will include close reading, in-depth discussion and feedback on your poems-in-progress, as well guidance on your next steps as a poet. If you would like to apply for a place please contact [email protected].