Poetry Workshop

....but seriously, though, you didn't think I was going to present a poetry workshop here, did you. I know that many enjoy and benefit from such sessions and good luck to them but it's a bit earnest for me.
Which is not to say there isn't worthwhile things to be said about poems. It's just that people do have this tendency to make up, or seek, guidelines about writing poems as if there were a cache of secrets to be discovered and then you'll do it better.
I don't believe there are. Each poem, as it has been said here before, succeeds or doesn't on its own terms and what applies to one poem might not apply to another. Thus rules, guidelines and advice are out. Just do it. It's about enjoyment, of any sort, that's all.
But in a yearr when I've been struggling for poems and collections for my shortlists of Best of the Year - which is my fault for not seeking them out-  I thought I'd stumbled upon a candidate when being passed a copy of Poetry Review. And whereas it is often a lot of modish cleverness and sometimes a bit precious, the issue contained an interview with Muldoon, poems by Arrmitage and Jane Yeh amongst others and reviews of books I had read, and others of interest, I was grateful for it. I immediately went to the poems by Jane Yeh who I've been impressed with before and if A Short History of Patience seemed okay but nothing special at first, I stuck with it and after several readings saw through my initial reservations and was ready to put it on my list. Until I realized that the magazine is c.2016. D'oh.

But, not to worry. It is still worth admiring some qualities in it that aren't tenets, models or the basis of any manifesto for future conduct but are the reasons why one might admire one poem above others and, yes, try to do something similar if one is not doing them already.
In a way, it is no more than a list of good lines, of metaphors for the situation. It doesn't move from a beginning to a conclusion particularly, like a 'history' might be expected to, but it doesn't have to and we can even enjoy a gentle irony in that.
The poem echoes the Old English Wulf and Eadwacer in its forlorn, undemonstrative pining for an absent lover although they seem to have gone for good of their own volition in Jane's poem whereas Wulf appears to be forcibly separated from Eadwacer.
It's quite possibly to get away with knowledge of only a handful of technical literary terms in a workshop and the fewer one tries to use the less chance you have of using them inappropriately or being found out so it's a good idea not to mention hyperbole, pathetic fallacy, zeugma or, especially, dying fall. But we might try to pass off  'objective correlative' with regards to A Short History of Patience in as far as it conjures the absence in a litany of sentences in terms of other things from,
The soft chiffon of the river as it turns
Out of view

to

     the evening's smoky eye draws near.

Both of which, like the others do, have an attractive music. And 'music' would be one item I'd have on an agenda for good poetry if agendas for good poetry were permissable but they aren't and it is quite possible, I dare say, to have a good poem that lacks obvious music.
It was,
                      without you it's cold
As a warthog's bare bottom

that first put me off a bit and where I thought I'd draw the line between quite good and brilliant. But re-reading is essential to give things a proper chance and it turned out to be me that was wrong in finding such words incongruous among the other, softer words. It signals a shift in the poem from morose self pity to a discomfort that becomes the spreading ennui of loss,
Ryegrass spreading thrrough the yard like an open secret.

That tells of malaise, a lack of maintenance as result of the disruption caused by the perceived end of the relationship and so maybe close reading eventually reveals that the poem has moved from one thought to another, very subtly.
It looks like a minor masterpiece to me which in many ways is preferable to the grandstand of a major masterpiece destined to become so well-known that nobody actually thinks about it any more.
Whether or not Jane Yeh's partner left her is of precious little interest if the object of our attention is the poem. We need not be convinced of its veracity by the fact that it is any good because a good writer will convince us of many things that aren't true. It is by now overdue that literary studies returned its focus to the words and not the author's biography which may or may not be any more of interest that than of your local greengrocer or plumber.
And, as such, I'd like to praise the poem's distance from its theme, the impersonal, objectified way it is a vehicle for the emotions it recreates for the reader rather than, in a Keatsian way, an expression of, and indulgence in, the emotions themselves. That might be a fine line but it's an important one.
We might love Keats- I certainly do- but it's for his odes rather than for being Keats. I'm much more interested in A Short History of Patience than I am in Jane Yeh who is, it says on the internet, ohlordjesussaveus, Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University. But at least it shows she can do it and perhaps, if there must be workshops, it ought to be her that leads them.   
--
But, oh look, here she is,
https://soundcloud.com/poetrysociety

One could get used to being retired on afternoons like this, the radio playing a Mozart Piano concerto, Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and Brahms 4 to the accompaniment of a bottle of Medoc.