"Why, I wondered, is a workshop supposed to make a poem 'better'? And in making a poem 'better' by implicitly turning to a set of inherited conditions that have proven their worth over the course of nearly a century, am I secretly pushing students into a place of received values that, in the end, undermines exactly that sort of complicating work poetry does, and for which I love it so deeply? Am I myself a product of such molding?" Dan Beachy-Quick • Poetry

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