[W T Clark]

One of the great problems with the expansiveness of poetry in workshops, is being recommended lists of poets who write in "form" (read metrical poetry, all good poetry is in form, metrical or not) such as the one put forward by Susan. Stallings, Cope, Majmudar, read them and you will read (mostly) inoffensive conversational voices making (mostly) inoffensive jokes, or telling a passionate narrative, or making intelligent observational lyricism (Stallings is the least guilty of these three, and indeed her poem "The Dogdoms of the Dead" is imaginative and strange, but it is in a minority). These three poets are not strange; they are pleasant and intelligent and metrical; but they do not (for the most part, with exceptions in Stallings and Majmudar's case) unsettle language. If you really want to read metrical poets who show you what poetry can do, read the early work of Geoffrey Hill, Wendy Videlock, Shane Mc'crae, Robert Lowell, and Maria Stepanova and Osip Mandelstam (in English metrical translation).

As to the question: I do not think it is the responsibility of the critiquer to try to not inhibit some vague idea of poetic expansiveness or newness, it is her job to examine technique and find out where it is going wrong, it is the poet's job to distinguish what critiques are useful.
We all dream of a purely brilliant poetry we will write; but language always betrays us. All we can do is try, and read, and learn. Language is a terrifying and beautiful strangeness.