I think the main issue I'm having with my workshop class this semester is not my classmates, who oddly seem much better poets than the majority of folks I've had in workshop formerly, and also more helpful somehow, but the instructor who seems to have a hard time grasping anything strange or even slightly innovative or experimental, surreal, etc. Any risk I attempt to take with language/image seems to escape her completely. I have the feeling that were I writing the same safe, staid, and polite poems I was penning three years ago, they'd be going over well. I've always had the feeling, and perhaps this is why I stayed in the program, that it was opening up my horizons on what was possible in poetry. Broadening my defininitions, or sometimes, changing them altogether. Even David Trinidad, whose comments made me bristle first semester regarding shaking up my poetic "formula" was, in the end, absolutely right. And with the other poets I've worked with: Arielle Greenberg, Karen Volkman, and especially Stephanie Strickland, and maybe even Clayton Eshelman (a little), I've been doing this. I think my work has exploded in all sorts of directions and possibilities. Now I feel like this semester is like the box closing instead of opening up, and while it probably isn't going to change anything about what I'm doing, it's still annoying and not really what I want to deal with at the moment. And it just makes my issues with workshop even more apparent. Thank fucking god this is my last semester. All I'll have left is some lit classes, the thesis, and an elective...

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