to workshop or not to workshop, a reply to Kay Ryan

I just finished reading Kay Ryan's article about unwillingly attending the AWP (Associated Writing Program) convention. She was doing it for an article she was writing, although she had spent an entire life avoiding it. I personally am a product of the very system she is so uncomfortable with, but of course, I see the contradiction in terms that it is... like an anarchist's convention. Writing is supposed to be something you do alone. It is the thing on the page, not the human beings that produced those things. It is harder, after all, to be cold and ruthless about not liking someone's work when you have met that person and liked him. I have been in this position, as has every other person in this game.
The workshop was a good thing for me, especially when I was very young, and had yet to develop that voice in my head that came only later about what was the right thing to say, the word to excise and the ones to replace it with. And then I was so lucky to have fallen into the workshop of an eminently generous writer, Richard Dillard, who was so full of the joy of writing that it was contageous. But I too have experienced the kinds of workshops that would put one off, and indeed for years did put me off writing poetry altogether, where one spent an hour discussing a comma and hours of tedious wrangling over grammar or subject matter. Many of these were joyless hours, far from the hours I had spent as an undergraduate, loving every minute.
And I am obviously a different sort of person from, let's say, my husband, who is also a poet, but who loves nothing better than sitting silently in a room listening to music or doing chess problems or playing the harmonica, while I love to jabber online to invisible friends, to shop, to go to yoga classes, to chat with my cats. I am sure that even when I am sleeping, my mouth is going. So workshops and trading emails with writing friends are natural to my personality, to my way of being.
There's more than one way to do everything, and I say there is room for it all, for Emily Dickenson, sewing poems carefully into pillows, and for jabbering workshoppers, talking the talk.