“During the in-class reading of the manuscripts, our group, as well as the fiction group, was making fun of quite a few of the manuscripts. While I think this might have been slightly unprofessional I do not think it was wrong. First, we were not attacking the person who wrote the pieces—the submissions were blind, after all—but the words themselves. Sometimes, poems are funny, regardless of the intent. Second, I think that it is very stiff to only ever take writing seriously. That is not to say that it is a job that should be taken lightly, but if writers only ever focused on the truth and seriousness of literature, they would miss a lot of what literature is about, because they would only have one perspective. Third, Ally Harris once asked a group of us at the Summer Writer’s Workshop if we were making fun of a story that was going to be discussed later. We told her yes, our heads hung. ‘Good,’ she said, ‘That’s what real writing majors do.’ I respect Ally Harris, and if she says that it is okay, I am willing to say that it is too.”
From my review of the chapbook making process for E&P
April 22, 2009 by exclamate
Posted in Reading | Tagged ally harris, bad poetry, boners, har har har, making fun | 4 Comments
4 Responses
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during writers workshop, ally also drew pictures of talking jewish pinecones & asked patrick henry every day to his face if he wanted to do drugs and then fuck & threw ravers in her room with us & the kids in our classes. so………..
i dont know what you guys are talking about
[…] to know i have an impact on former students of mine grin. man, what’s going to happen when i’m so old that stories which are told stop getting […]