pUSH hANDS

I found Jeffrey Skinners essay, "Push Hands: Balancing Resistance and Revision" extremely encouraging for a writer who suffers from a lot of the dilemmas that Skinner talks about. I found myself often saying, "I'm that guy" when he talked about students who ask, "What gives you the right to say what's poetry and what's not?" After reading this piece I felt compelled to revisit some of my own work and revise it, poetry mainly. Out of everything he had to say in this essay, one thing really stuck with me because I have the tendency not just as a writer, but as a person, to get ahead of myself when he said, "Slow down. Wait."
I think this is really the best advice any writer or teacher can give to a student/writer because when you try and force yourself to be creative nothing good will come of it and you'll just be as much or more frustrated as when you began.