By Tami Haaland
In recent years I’ve been deliberately exploring the process of reflection, how it can be useful both in terms of developing awareness and intention. When students submit work for a grade, I require a short reflective essay that discusses strengths and weaknesses in their writing along with their plans for the next stage of development. Mind you, they have plenty of opportunities to receive feedback and make revisions before the grading comes along.
But this act of reflecting is something different. It requires that the writer deliberately think about how far they’ve come and where they would like to go.
In the past, I often incorporated a minimal version of reflection in my own practice—and I still do. It goes something like this. An issue will come to my attention and so I pose a question—how do I work with form in my poems? What makes a good ending? What would I like my line breaks to be?
That question, then, gets housed in the back of my head, the less conscious part of the mind, the “reptilian brain,” as Stanley Kunitz once said in a Chautauqua presentation, the place that poetry comes from. Here, I mull it over while I’m working on other things. That way my experiments and conscious efforts that address this concern find their way into my poetry.
Research shows that reflection helps us learn more effectively because it makes us more active participants in our learning. If you, your writing group or your circle of critical readers notice a pattern in your writing that may not be serving you well, then consider tracing the pattern, posing questions, or writing a short journal entry as a first step in addressing it.
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Tami Haaland is the author of three poetry collections, What Does Not Return, When We Wake in the Night, and Breath in Every Room, winner of the Nicholas Roerich First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in many periodicals and anthologies, including, Ascent, Consequence, The American Journal of Poetry, The Ecopoetry Anthology, and Healing the Divide. Her work has also been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, and The Slowdown. Haaland served as Montana’s Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2015 and has received a Governor’s Humanities Award, an Artist Innovation Award from Montana Arts Council, and writing residencies from Absoraka-Beartooth Wilderness Foundation and Provincetown Fine Arts Center. She is a professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Montana State University Billings.
