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I don't understand the question.

Your only responsibility when critiquing is to try to say something useful in a useful manner. The precise tone with which you convey your remarks is up to you, provided it is not purposely cruel or dishonestly kind. Don't patronize the poet by supposing that your views are so crucial that they could induce either bad feelings or bad revisions.

But I suppose we all knew that already. So I guess I don't understand the question.

John - we are talking about Workshops, not Poetry Appreciation Salons. If the only critiquing any of us did on the Workshop Boards was to applaud nicely at the poems we admired, gossip about related subjects, and talk about ourselves, it would be a nice little chat room, but hardly a Workshop, and hardly helpful. And since none of us are Crane or Ginsberg or Hughes or Kipling, we need the help.

Maryann, you were on the other page and got left out. Sorry.

It's not a matter of not commenting because a poem is or isn't good, but rather of a critic having enough affinity with a style rather than, but also including, a subject. I'm not saying that anyone here ploughs in mindlessly. Not at all! (Notice that please Janice;-) The idea of working one's way dutifully through all sorts of poems because they are there will do nothing for the poem although it may gradually educate us all as poets, but at tremendous cost to a few poets who were just beginning to find their voice in some unusual way.

It's not destructive to point out the elements in a poem that are ineffective. It's necessary.

With infinite care and self doubt.




Janice, not only were you not charged with having failed to support anything, you didn't come into it at all.

Nemo, thank you!

Michael, of course this isn't a beginner's site.

Dee, yes critics and poets have their style and that's as it should be. I was philosophising, not criticising.

John ;-)

Alan, we know where you live too.

Rose: wthayta?

Roger, right.

Michael And since none of us are Crane or Ginsberg or Hughes or Kipling, we need the help. Who says?

John, I really have to weigh in in agreement with Michael. I try to get to almost everything when I'm actively posting--at least in the thread in which I'm posting. It would be much easier to be an active member here if I only commented on poems "to my taste" (which would include poems by Hart Crane and Allan Ginsberg). We're one group here to work, John.

RM

By the way, I think someone should register at least passing shock and chagrin at the dissing of Walt Whitman, so I will do it. Walt Whitman was one of the towering geniuses of poetry, with various passages deserving to be incorporated into the Bible. I just thought I'd mention that. John is funnier, though.

Michael, it's not a matter of If the only critiquing any of us did on the Workshop Boards was to applaud nicely at the poems we admired ... it's the poems we understand. That's if the poem's own voice is to be strengthened rather than translated into emotional esperanto.

I remember this post from 2004 from Henry Quince (in a thread entitled "Very Short Poems", on Musing on Mastery), where he light-heartedly suggested what fate might have befallen a famous poem, had it appeared on TDE seeking advice.

Here is the post:

=================

REQUIEM

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie;
Glad did I live and gladly die
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
"Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill."

...
But what would one of the more theoretical critics in our Deep End make of this, I wonder?

L1: Under the wide and starry sky

(First line should establish the norm of the meter: change Under to Beneath)

"starry sky" is a cliché. Try "Beneath the wide and dark night sky"

L2: Dig the grave and let me lie.

Oh-oh. Sense alert! You want your grave dug at night? The gravediggers will claim overtime. Anyway where else could you lie but under the sky? The whole thing's a poeticism. So take out L1 and 2.

L3: Glad did I live and gladly die.

Where to start with this?! Poetic inversion AND a wrenching of grammar to fit the meter. If you lived gladLY, surely you died gladLY? So try something like "I lived gladly and died gladly".

L4: And I laid me down with a will.

More archaic poeticism. Illogicality, too. You laid yourself down, after you were dead? Even if we let that pass, your laying yourself down with a will is just repeating that you were died gladly". So omit L4.

L5: This be the verse you grave for me.

Archaic: try "Inscribe this on the grave for me".

L6: Here he lies where he longed to be

Fix meter and inversion with "He lies here where he longed to be".

L7: Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

(Rhetorical repetition and, again, inversion. How about "The sailor's back home from the sea"?

L8: And the hunter home from the hill.

Implied verb here. Better make it explicit. Two anapests in here, too. The hunter doesn't really go with the sailor, anyway, so I suggest "The prisoner at last is free."

Putting the rewrite together:

I lived gladly and died gladly.
Inscribe this on the grave for me:
He lies here where he longed to be.
The sailor's back home from the sea
The prisoner at last is free.

Yep, that'll do it!

Don't take me too seriously, folks!

Henry"

====================

Surely one of the best cautionary tales from a poetry workshop.

If a person posts a poem (or even a crit, for that matter) in a WORKSHOP doesn't that imply that they are looking for intrusion??? Indeed, not only looking for it but actively seeking it?

How is it instrusion to give them what they want?


Nothing more than that. I don't know what is "wrong" and I have no complaints nor examples of bleeding corpses.

Janet, apparently there was something which set you off for you said, in an earlier post addressed to Janice,

There's an example of whatever it is you're trying to sugarcoat somewhere or else you couldn't have stated the above. All protest to the contrary seems like a really bad attempt at distraction.

Mark, Henry has moments of wonderfulness.


Lo, None of what you wrote applies. If you want an argument start one in another thread. You missed the point which is my point.