it’s been a busy summer and one of the highlights was attending the third annual Catamaran Literary Conference and studying with Joseph Millar. Each day we wrote poems and re-visioned them during the workshop. Millar’s emphasis on the image as the most important element of the poem, his insistent and insightful editing, i.e, scrapping all the “telling” or self-consciousness in my poems at first made me a bit angry and later released me. The poems remain, clearer, stronger, more accessible to the reader and in better artistic form.
Another more recent highlight was interviewing Robert Sward, the new poet laureate of Santa Cruz County. When I asked him about one most important thought on writing poetry his response, “Writing is re-writing.”