Funniest thread in recent memory. Most aggravating thread in recent memory.
Elise: There is likely near the upper-left of your browser window a clickable link: "guidelines." Perhaps you'd like it better if we got Alex to change it to "rules," but close enough, right? Anyway, click on it. There's pages of info there; it should answer your question.
Fair enough, you're right that there are unspoken rules like social mores in any community. But approximately 75 people have explained approximately eleventy billion ways to you how they see those here. They all seem in agreement with each other (you know, approximately) to everyone but you. I guess I think you're the only one who can answer your original question "workshop or not?" (For myself, it's almost always an emphatic YES whenever I write something new and feel OK or better about it...) I would suggest that if there are kinds of feedback you're looking for beyond WELL DONE!, then go for it. I would further suggest that if you are polite and thoughtful in response to the feedback that you get, then you have fulfilled that part of your obligation. Would you really want a forum that OBLIGED you to incorporate into your poems revisions that you thought wrong?!
As to the beginners thing, I think that stricture is designed and functions to protect us from a lot of wasted time. In practice, beginners who come to learn and comport themselves well (and I don't mean anyone should have to grovel) have been welcome from what I have seen. Arguably that was my experience. In fact, I think there's a lot to be said for the philosophy of remembering that we are all, in one sense, beginners together stumbling toward the occasional poem worth keeping--although, in another sense, for many of us this is manifestly not true.
Your internet pal,
--Simon
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Hybrid Mode
