Conflict, Writing, My Poems

One of my co-workshoppers in the UCLA Extension class I am taking said something interesting about my poems. According to her, my poems have a sense of conflict which is largely missing from the poems she reads. This made me think a lot about readership. For one thing, I don't really know who she reads. But the poets I read and love to read, all engage with conflict, and sometimes multiple forms of conflicts. Maybe I read "political" poets more. Although, I would say, all poems, all texts are political. It's what kind of politics they are engaging in, and how, that makes all the difference. I am thinking, what does it mean to write about conflict? That there are inequalities in the world? That people who do not enjoy power and privileges question their own locations, and ultimately engage in resistance? That we all occupy contradictory material and subjective positions in life? All of the above?

Something I need to think about more.

This somehow also makes me think about Mary Pipher's book Writing to Change the World, which I just finished. It has lots of great insights to begin with. But, what I find lacking is specifically an engagement with the question: how does one write from a place of simultaneous anger and hope? What if one is expressing one's love in writing through an expression of anger? Personally, I think, Pipher is not that willing to deal with systemic dimensions of power. Consequently, she also does not think of writing as something that can sharpen the contradictions inherent within the workings of power. At the end of the day, although I don't think she intends it that way, the book ends up suggesting ways to dissolve the conflicts, rather than let them ripen.

If I have to be non-pc about it, it's a little too hippie-dippie for me. Although there were some great insights, from which I can learn. Also, she has a good bibliography of all kinds of books-- children's books, novels, memoirs---and I need to dig into some of them!