Compliments on Recent Writing Poetry Workshop

I don’t often like to brag.  But a participant at one of my poetry writing workshops for adults wrote me about what impact it had on him.  He is a fine poet who I admire, so the compliment felt really good.  (By the way, I do workshops for kids too. Right now I’m working with Lewiston 6th graders and high school students as part of the LA Arts Project.  As a teacher, sometimes you wonder if you’ve had any impact.  So some kind words go a long way. I love working with teachers to show them how poetry can be an easy leverage point to get students to learn grammar, to learn how to do presentations and to do public speaking, and to develop their writing stylistically. )

Here is what Doug said:

Bruce Spang is a fine teacher as well as a fine poet. His teaching style is deceptively laid back — he really knows his stuff but only reveals his wealth of knowledge when the moment is appropriate. He does not lord it over the class, nor does he try to impose his own particular style onto the amateur poets he is leading through his workshop. Rather, he coaxes, provides amazing examples of a diverse range of poets and their poems, and then provides incredibly precise, thoughtful feedback on his students’ own works. Personally, I appreciated the writing exercises we did in class — each one resulting in a new poem for me that I found to be worth reworking after the class ended. Finally, having attended Bruce’s reading from his own poetry and his new novel, having procured two of his collections, I can attest to the power of his own writing. Bruce is the real deal — a serious poet, in his own right, and a gifted teacher, willing and able to pass his hard-earned expertise on to others. ~Doug Rawlings