All Over the Place: Poetry Workshop

By Michael H. Brownstein

You must suffer to be beautiful, the fat woman said.

You must let the poet’s poem be the poet’s poem, the workshop leader intoned.

You must let God be in both pain and surf, the old man stated from across the table.

You need to understand how much pain there can be in earnestness, the fat woman rebutted.

A poet cannot be a poet until they have known hunger and abandonment, answered the boy at one

                        end.

Nonetheless, the workshop leader chimed in, a poem belongs to the poet. It is not our job to take it

                        from them.

Copyright © 2022 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.