--Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Okay, before you start wondering, I'm referring to myself in the title. I'd originally titled it "The Bitch is Back," but I decided that that might confuse people even more, and wasn't really PC enough.

But, anyway, over in the Poetry Workshop, I'm back. With a vengeance.

Well, I was on the giving end of that today, and I must say I enjoyed it. Nothing major; I just honestly pointed out that my immediate reaction to the first stanza of one of the poems under discussion was that I'd heard it before, and that the Beatles had done it better. The poem, I said, was just an extended remix of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."

That hurt, apparently. Good; it deserved it. Score one for the critic.

Well, that was well and good until today, when she "corrected" me for not using the term "stanza" for something that was clearly not a stanza. And so I naturally had to reply that it wasn't a stanza; a stanza refers very specifically to verse organized in a regular pattern of lines, generally with a regular pattern of meter and rhyme. Free verse generally doesn't have stanzas; it has verse paragraphs.

She replied that that was an extremely conservative definition of "stanza." I countered that it was the one you'd find in any dictionary of poetic terms. And then, after saying she'd look into this later, she said the bit that shocked me, illustrating once again that our visions of a poetry workshop are so different that perhaps I really shouldn't be here at all.

Specifically, she said that, well, most poets she knows use the word "stanza" to refer to any grouping of lines in a poem, regular or not, and that, presumably, most of us were in this course in the first place because we know she's a fairly successful writer of poetry, and want to benefit from her experience as a writer. And not from her experience with literature and literary analysis, which she granted she's pretty deficient in.

If that's really the way she looks at it, I can't quite see what business she thinks she has being a teacher in the first place. Indeed, I can only hope she's just downplaying her literary experience. Because, frankly, while I won't go quite as far as to say that her experience as a writer ought to count against her, I certainly wouldn't count it as a positive attribute for a teacher.

Writing, editing, literary analysis, and teaching all require different sets of skills. And while they can certainly complement one another, it's by no means a given that somebody who's good at one will be any good at all at another. There are some who can manage a few or all of the above, but they're comparatively rare.

(For what it's worth, I consider myself to be a better editor and critic than a writer. Which suggests the question of why this site is billed as the journal of "an aspiring writer" in the first place. The answer is that it's partly because it seemed more appropriate for a writing-based site; partly because it was the easiest, broadest label to attach to myself for the front page; and partly because calling it the journal of "an English major" just didn't sound as cool. I think. If you suppose I remember my thought processes from January, you're mistaken.)

Anyway, writing experience is close to worthless in a workshop. The focus there is in analyzing poetry, in seeing what's going on beneath the surface, what's working, what needs to be fixed, and how to go about fixing it. All of this falls into the realm of analysis and editing. Not writing.

So it's not her writing experience that interested me at all, and I'm stunned to find out it's supposed to be a reason to take her course. Her critical experience, her analytical experience, her pedagogical experience, yes. But if she's downplaying the important stuff and stressing the bit that doesn't matter as being the essential bit... well, umm, what am I doing here?

Yesterday was one of those days when you just never quite wake up, dragging yourself sluggishly from place to place once it becomes unavoidable. To make a long story short, I missed my first hour of work and my Theories of Feminism class, and then spent a half hour at Financial Aid when I theoretically should have been working.

On the bright side, I finally applied for that student loan I keep going on about, and, apparently, I am entitled to the maximum -- $5,500 -- which I'm borrowing, and, well, anyway, that much is well with the world.

On the I'm-not-sure-how-to-take-this side, I apparently was also eligible for a Pell Grant, but I may have blown this by not doing anything about it earlier. Nice to know, I suppose. I'm not clear on whether I'll still be getting this down the line or not.

I still need to file the actual tax forms and get my father's tax information (despite having stressed to him and my uncle that I needed that too, it wasn't sent to me with my forms) and get him to sign my application for state aid, so the state can then turn it down, but, anyway, the biggest hurdle has been leapt, I think.

Incidentally, the Financial Aid guy wanted to know how in the world I was managing to live, given my income. That's what I was there for, I replied. (And that I'd had some savings -- now gone -- and that I'd been borrowing, and that I wasn't eating all that much.)

I'm not sure why I'm reporting this here, but having mentioned the other two, I guess I've gotten into the habit.