Jim,
Your further explanation is much more measured than some of your earlier responses (like the one preceding it), so thank you for that. I hope we can get things on a better footing now. Perhaps we've both calmed down a bit!
After an absence of more than four years I suppose I can understand why you felt the need to ease your way back gradually, but you're a long-standing member here, and pretending to be someone else - especially having to involve Alex in creating a new profile - was not the best way to go about things, which I think you now recognise.
I closed the "Sean Shinawill'' thread because it was getting people's backs up, no such person exists... and you had ''come clean'' by that time anyway. I have no intention of closing this one.
After the initial bad start, bumping a two-year old thread and then posting another poem the day after your first one were further annoyances; you clearly forgot some of the rules during your absence!
You did ''ask for it'' a bit after all that, and to be honest I half-expected your poem to get slaughtered but, as you say, you got some helpful comments. (It's "Gordonstoun'', by the way, Jim, not Gordanston.)
Now, regarding If I post [at The Deep End] now, or indeed anyone else I suppose, it will be seen as provocative attention seeking or affectation even, I don’t agree with you. If anything, now that you’ve opened up this big debate and you feel as you do about it, continuing to post there would seem quite natural.
I used to post at TDE, but only what I considered to be my much better stuff, for robust criticism. We all churn out a variety of quality in our poems and, for me, when I thought (or hoped!) I’d got a good ’un, usually a serious poem, The Deep End was the place to put it. Metrical or Drills and Amusements are better suited for light-hearted poems IMO, ...but I'm not saying it's wrong to post an amusing one on TDE.
That’s why, and I’ve said it before, I don’t want to see the end of The Deep End, as so many members do – and I don’t believe Alex does either, or he’d have surely zapped it by now! You’ve opened it up again, like Aaron P did not so long ago...maybe others will follow suit, maybe they won't, but for now, at least, the choice remains.
Jayne
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