[Quincy Lehr]

Well, folks, I have a solution, the "Mark Allinson Is King of the Universe, With His New Wife Britney Spears," a board devoted to what's wrong with Australian academe, the life of John Dunne, the greatness of Vegemite, and, of course, poems for general critique only. However, the trade-off is that the only critiques permitted will be negative and from the following list:

1. Rubbish.
2. Garbage.
3. Putrid!
4. Infamy!
5. You know, I never thought a poem could provoke flatulence... but I guess you learn something new every day.
6. This poem serves as a reminder as to why stupid people shouldn't drop acid.
7. Can you read?
8. This disproves the truism that a roomful of monkeys banging away on typerwriters will eventually, albeit at random, produce Shakespeare.
10. How did you manage this without an opposable thumb?
11. Keep posting stuff like this, and we'll get stupid, too.
12. Did you get your ass kicked a lot when you were in high school? Hell, I'll bet you're still in high school. Yeah, forty years old my ass.

Quincy

[Mark Allinson]

Michael, are you saying you think I should risk posting another poem like "Elemental", and not only be told how "wrong" it is, but be brow-beaten post after post into changing it to something more conventional?

Fat chance.

And where where you, Howard, when I explained what happened to that poem?

You seemed to be all excited about the up-coming discussion (with your Homer clip), but then ... silence.

What happened?

Cat get your fingers?

[Rose Kelleher]

One last post and then I promise to shut up.

Crazy idea: why not create an additional forum, called The Sharing Forum, or Forum X, or The Making Mark Happy Forum, or something like that? Now before you yell at me, I don't know how much work that would entail. Alex and the moderators (sounds like a doo wop group) may well be overworked as it is. But if not, here are some things to consider.

1) It's obvious Mark really, really, really wants it. And we like Mark. We may think he's a little kookles, but he's a nice person, a knowledgeable reader, a fine poet, an independent thinker, and a brilliant essayist. Why not humor him in this one thing, which would take nothing away from the existing forums?

2) No more of these "deja vu" threads started by Mark or others who are more interested in "sharing" or light critique than heavy-duty workshopping. Just refer them to the new forum.

3) It's easy to say "Go post to your blog" or the Pink Palace or whatever, but we all know that's not the same. We know that most of the people who post here are receptive to formal verse. And we know there are people here whose opinions we respect. So-and-so probably isn't going to google my blog, but he might peek into Forum X while he's here. So a forum here wouldn't actually duplicate something that's available elsewhere.

I'm not going to lobby for this, since I'm not the one it would create work for, nor am I all that interested in the thing. I'm just humbly, meekly, naively throwing the question out there.

[Mark Allinson]

Thanks, Rose.

That is a very generous suggestion, but I think a forum of my own is going just a bit too far.

(Although it does sound interesting, I admit).

I will explain my most basic reason for wanting a "crit-lite" forum here:

because I would like to participate without the HUGE risk of another "Elemental" situation.

And that sort of aggressive bullying, under the guise of "objective critique, just disgusts me.

When you are told by the experts that your poem is WRONG, then you are left with three choices:

[1] Change the poem for the sake of peace (and change it back off the board before submitting it for pub).

[2] Contest the suggestions and get the thread locked.

[3] Stop posting.

And believe me, I have done ALL three.

I was just looking for an alternative.

But as Rose says:


"Oh nevermind!"

[Howard]

What you consistently overlook is the fourth option:

[4] Thank the commenters, and don't follow their suggestions while not making an issue of it.

It's option [2] --at least the part before the conjunction -- that causes you many of your problems; get beyond it.




[This message has been edited by Howard (edited November 17, 2006).]

[Ethan Anderson]

What you're asking for, Mark, is setting limits on the range of negative comments prior to your posting on a crit site, while still garnering the attention of critters you respect.

So, in other words, you want to hear what you want to hear when you want to hear it from the people you want to hear it from.

You aren't interested in exposing your work to the risk of genuine crits, but you want the attention of those that deliver them. So the very thing that makes the critters credible in your mind is what must be curtailed if they are to approach your work in a fashion you find palatable.

The solution, in your mind, is to ask everyone else to change.

Another solution is to post, take all the crits for what they're worth, according to your own standards, in the comfort of your own home, thank the critters for taking the time regardless of what they say, make your own decisions about what to do next, according to your own standards, in the comfort of your own home, and move on.

A solution that would enable you to post again, while allowing everyone else on the site to be just as they are.




[This message has been edited by Ethan Anderson (edited November 17, 2006).]

[Carol Taylor]

Mark, you don't seem to understand that nobody really cares what you do with your poems or what I do with mine. We ask each other for opinions, okay? That means that whether we hope to improve the poem or not, we want to know how other poets react to it. Don't even think of asking for my opinion if you don't want to hear it. You get what you get. Don't even think of trying to extract a commitment in advance that I will give only "general comments." Don't attempt to stipulate what aspects of your poem I may critique and what I may not critique, what suggestions I may make for improving it and what is off limits. And don't try to argue me out of my opinion.

If you call two words that end in the same sound rhymes, that's fine with me. The rest of the world may call them identities, but you are free to call them rhymes if you like. We are probably wrong and you are right. Either way, it doesn't mean you can't use them. There's no law that says a poem has to rhyme at all. If you rhyme a stressed syllable with an unstressed one, that's fine with me. But if you ask for critique in a metrical workshop, you are apt to have metrical discrepancies pointed out, particularly if they impact the working of the poem. We will tell you what we, as individiduals, think works or doesn't work, but you can do exactly as you please with the poem. You have my permission. I think we made that entirely clear at the time you were posting on TDE, but it wasn't good enough. You just kept insisting, trying to argue us out of our opinions--in fact, to convince us we were "wrong" in thinking as we thought. And you're still at it. If we're wrong, why do you care so much what we think?

Carol

[Mark Allinson]

Another solution is to post, take all the crits for what they're worth, according to your own standards, in the comfort of your own home, thank the critters for taking the time regardless of what they say, make your own decisions about what to do next, according to your own standards, in the comfort of your own home, and move on.

Ethan!

You have just outlined my perfect scenario.

And I admit, I have had many such experiences here.

Wouldn't it be marvellous if it was always that simple.

[Quincy Lehr]

In all seriousness, I have always seen Mark's point on this, but wonder why he (Mark) feels the need to do it on this board. As I have raised many times in the past, there's no law against e-mailing poems around, or, in the case of someone like Mark, who does publish around and who has a chapbook out (Modern Metrics, 2006--see http://www.modern-metrics.com for details), encouraging people to read his published work. And one should read Mark's work, because it is generally quite good.

I didn't see the discussion on "Elemental" here and won't take sides in that particular debate, but I've had experiences here as well as other places where people just don't get it.

A friend who posts here sometimes remarked that if Milton posted Paradise Lost here, it would come out a haiku. Sometimes, I think that's true. Sometimes. But my experiences with the board have been, on balance, positive, kickin' it on Met, pwning Janet in discussions on initial caps (you're great, Janet, and I'm quite fond of you, but that discussion was serious pwnage on the part of Childers and myself), and asking people to write poems about my old station wagon, which, for some damn reason, they did.

Quincy

[Janet Kenny]

Dammit,
Poets are lonely. Just as painters are lonely. They need the company of other poets/painters. Emails doesn't/don't do it. We want interaction and fresh ideas and jokes and "have you read this?" We want to meet surprising people whom we wouldn't know unless we mixed it on a forum. Not all of us live in cities and even when we do we are locked into our narrow worlds.

This is not a sin and where better to meet such poets than on an intelligent poetry forum like this? If it were just a free-for-all it would invite maddies and people who didn't care about poetry. We all have to prove our worth before we can participate on any useful level, be it social or poetical.

And I was right about the caps in modern poetry so there. Except of course in cases when I am wrong.
Janet



[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited November 17, 2006).]