Dear Eratophiles,
Although I have managed somewhat well as a writer of poetry who "scores" in print, and have been asked to "teach" poetry from time to time, I seem to irritate quite a few people in cyberspace.
Recently on this site, after having been asked to post a poem -- a piece of which had drawn peripheral attention -- I had "Rinaldo" attack me for being, I think, feckless and out of touch. In his rather weirdly written piece, he assumed that I assumed that no one else had ever been on TV. Or that I had never held a drunk at gunpoint. Who could know? So, I wrote him off as crazy. Certainly not a "critic" of my work.
However, I checked in tonight and found this descriptive fragment from a respected "regular" describing a piece into which I thought I'd poured some intelligence and craft:
<<this trivial scrap of barely metrical clap-trap....>>
Now, this is relevant. The critic doesn't attack me, just the piece that he considers "barely metrical clap-trap."
So, I ask myself, "Is it trivial because I use grape-nuts? Is it trivial because in a poem that employs grape-nuts, I use death and entropy"?
Is it a "scrap" because it's only two balanced, yet offsetting, five-line stanzas? Is it "barely metrical" because its rhythm rides over an iambic tetrameter base that begins with the structure of one of the most famous lines in poetry? (I WILL cut "near" in line nine.)
Is it trivial because much of its diction has to do with entropy? Well, I don't find it trivial. I don't find it clap-trap. Nothing that this critic says effects me because, although he attacks the poem, not me, he doesn't DEMONSTRATE its triviality or its clap-trappedness. He's attacked the poem, but he hasn't convinced me. He's not been literate.
To me, neither of the two "critics" I cite are valuable.
In workshops we've got to learn to read our readers.
Bob
[This message has been edited by Robert J. Clawson (edited March 26, 2001).]
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