I looked up "Aftershocks," which was in the 2003 Sonnet Bake-off (not workshopped).
And lo and behold,
in the thread announcing it as one of the winners, several people took the opportunity to lament that the response had fallen off significantly from the previous year's Bake-off.
Even in the Golden Age, people were longing for how much better things used to be. (Not that they didn't make good points.)
It seems more productive to focus on making the most out of the present realities. One such reality is that I seem to be getting grumpier (which is sometimes unhelpful and unwelcoming and I'll try to keep that under control better than I did in a recent critique); but I think that my grumpiness has positive qualities, too. I'm more likely now than in 2003 to say I don't like something, and I doubt that my previous silence helped many people to become better poets.
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