[Mary Boren]

Hi Glenn,

Your title is a dead give-away to writers' incest. I'm not saying that's a bad thing if the target audience is fellow poets — no doubt each has an arsenal of tributes to the process, and where else but a vibrant workshop can one find emotional support for the addiction? Poking fun at ourselves is thoroughly enjoyable therapy. That's what keeps pulling me back here in search of community where familiar language is spoken, without which I've succumbed to the muse only twice in the past year-and-a-half. Believe me, it's a barren desert out there on the other side of the fence. Just four more critiques to complete my internship here.

All that simply to assure that I hear you. My favorite bit is the image of trimming their little toenails. We lovingly groom each child sent out into the world infused with a piece of our own heart that soars or shatters in direct relation to how they are received. And, with luck, they make friends to invite home for supper.

But since nitpicking is obligatory in a proper workshop, I have to add that your toddler still bleeds a bit around the feet with the abundance of willy-nilly trochaic and spondaic substitutions. While modern poetry largely rejects the monotony of immaculate iambic pentameter, I submit a few ways to tiptoe firmly through the blandscape without loss of musicality. Enjambment, caesura, judicious *occasional* attention grabbing sidesteps, and even punctuation can be used to effectively control pacing and keep those couplets from clanging singsongily along. Conversational tone can be achieved even with elevated figurative language, which you've done here for the most part, but this line, for example, suffers remaining small word choppiness ...

yet, still, I feel your shame in my thin skin.

Yet and still are essentially interchangeable, "I feel" adds nothing to the confessional, and the predictable "thin skin" is not worthy of metrical interruption. How about something like ...

your infamy still burns my paper skin.

(Or better in your own words.)

I hope this might be useful as well as empathetic.

Mary