Getting Published – A Poetry Workshop Can Help

An Interview With Mary Stewart Hammond-Poet and Teacher

Oct 28, 2009

An interview with the award-winning poet published in The New Yorker about her poetry workshop, teaching style, and publishing success of her students.

This interview is with a poet and teacher, Mary Stewart Hammond, whose poetry workshop helps students not only write better poetry, but publish as well.

And she should know. Her credits include poems in The New Yorker and other top-tier publications. In addition to teaching the workshop, Hammond works privately as a consultant on book manuscripts.

During the interview, Hammond shared information about her philosophy of teaching, how she helps poets decide what's working in the poem, and how her students have progressed. Poets can consider the method used in this workshop as a guide to finding a good workshop for themselves.

Her credits include her book, Out of Canaan, published by W.W. Norton, which received the Great Lakes Colleges Association's "Best First Collection of Poetry" Award, her publication in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and other high caliber magazines and journals, and her inclusion in many anthologies. See more about her career highlights and publications.

Poetry Workshop: Teaching Goals

Suite101: What is your “mission” in teaching poetry? What is your main objective, the thing that, for you, drives everything else?

Hammond: The Basque poet Bernardo Atxaga states, 'Either a poem is exact or bad--as happens with science.' The same is true of a building. If we are to use the word "mission," I suppose mine, where teaching is concerned, is to help the poet/poem reach exactness...the best poems have both spatial and temporal dimensions; they have an architecture.

Hammond: My job is to protect the poem, and protecting the poem means fingering what isn't working in the poem, and why. Often this means protecting the poem from the poet who wrote it, and from others in the class who, it seems to me, are misreading the poem, or are over-reading it, projecting meaning on it that isn't quite there.

Craft and Writing Style

Suite101: There are many workshops out there for students to choose from.What makes yours different?

Hammond: There is a heavy focus on craft, looking at how much of the emotional work of a poem the structure and music do, or undo, to what language and syntax tell us about the clarity of the poem's thinking and its complexity of feeling, and the way the poems' particular vision determines these choices.

Hammond: I ... select poets who are all writing different kinds of poems, which stretches them to meet work outside their temperament or sensibility, making them better readers which will make them better poets.

Students Publish Poems, Chapbooks, and Poetry Books

Hammond: This is easy. Everyone in the workshop can see the poems get better. The poets begin publishing, or publishing in better places than before, publishing chapbooks, entire books, winning contests. Their circle of influence widens. They become successful as the world measures success.

Hammond: Write better poems. Read better poems. Read widely. Look at the journals and see which ones are publishing poems you like. If you like what they are publishing, it is likely that is the place that will like what you are writing. It's a form of marketing. There is no point in sending a narrative poem to a place that is publishing language poetry (dreadful name for a particular style of poetry; we all are dealing with language), or edgy twitterings.

In addition to the intrinsic pleasure of writing poetry, many poets would like to write better and publish their work. Mary Stewart Hammond, whose credits include The New Yorker, and other highly regarded journals, helps poets reach that goal. For those who are interested, follow this link to poetry workshops. It's a start to finding the "right" workshop-one that is empowering as well as instructive.

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The copyright of the article Getting Published – A Poetry Workshop Can Help in Writing Poetry is owned by Elizabeth Harrington. Permission to republish Getting Published – A Poetry Workshop Can Help in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.