[Cross-posted with a bunch of people]
Sorry, Jim, but I'm rather humorless in the "Make [Anything] Great Again" department of late. Especially when your "Make The Deep End Great Again" argument compares the Met Board to "Marxism/socialism." (Really? All we need is a resident strongman/sage like Alan in The Deep End, and then the Golden Age of the Sphere will come again?)
Actually, I remember the male-bonding-through-fraternity-style-hazing vibe of The Deep End under Alan far less fondly than you do--not because I couldn't
take Alan's tough criticism, but because I couldn't
get Alan's tough criticism.
Alan was, indeed, a brilliantly insightful critic who had a talent for putting his finger directly on why a poem wasn't working. I would have loved to have his opinion of mine. However, Alan deigned to comment (either positively or negatively) on
women's poems far less often than on
men's poems. He just didn't deem women worthy of his attention, most of the time.
You probably didn't notice, being a man, and thus receiving the benefit of both Alan's savage crits and his rare-but-treasured encouragement. But in all the years we overlapped here, I only received about three critiques from Alan. Maybe he assumed that I wouldn't be able to take his blunt comments, so he just didn't bother.
After his death, when I heard male poet after male poet talk about how valuable Alan's tough love had been to their formation as poets, I had to bite my tongue because he was not so generous with me. I learned a lot of valuable lessons from his critiques, but those lessons were mostly overheard. He almost never directed any comments to me at all. And certainly no encouragement. To encourage someone, you have to care whether they succeed or fail. I was a non-entity to Alan.
One of the best things about the blind submission process for the Bake-offs was that it allowed me to
finally get a really substantive, thoughtful crit out of him on my work, when Alan was the judge. Had he known it was my work, I'm sure he would have skipped reading it altogether. In fact, the reason I'm so sure of that is because
he already had: my Bake-off entry had been previously workshopped on The Deep End, and Alan didn't recognize it in the Bake-off--presumably because he almost never bothered to click on any workshop thread with my name on it.
Under Alan's reign, I was also bothered by a certain toadyism on the part of the latest batch of novice poets (male and female), who often seemed compelled to echo Alan's critiques in their own words--to win the Great Man's approval, or perhaps to feel that they were themselves part of the elite priesthood capable of writing astute critiques, even if they had to plagiarize Alan in order to do so. Their copycat advice was generally in the authoritative vein of "There are rules for writing a successful poem--conform to those, or write crap."
I much preferred grasshopper's (Margaret Griffiths') crits, which were no less brutally honest than Alan's, but which never seemed gratuitously unkind or bullying. I always got the sense that she was trying to guide poets to write the best poem that THEY could write, in their own voices. In contrast, Alan's crits (and the Alan-style crits of his acolytes) were more "Do this, do that, cut everything after S3, and then you'll have something"--but the "something" they would "have" would be more in Alan's voice than in the poets' own.
The main reason that few Sphereans post to The Deep End anymore is not fear of harsh criticism, but the fact that
any poem promising enough for a poet to want to post to TDE is probably promising enough for the poet to want to publish it somewhere special someday, and too many editors have policies at least as restrictive as Light's:
Quote:
● Please submit only poems that have never been published online. (Posting a poem in a blog or on a public social-media page counts as publication. Workshopping a poem in a forum not visible to the public does not.)
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If The Deep End were a password-protected area, as the Deep Drills boards are, I would post my original work on Eratosphere again. Until then, the downsides of having my unfinished work visible to the public outweigh the upsides for me, and I'll only workshop my translations.
If poets could post no more than one poem to a password-protected The Deep End per month, I think many Sphereans would keep posting to the Met Board while awaiting their next turn on TDE. I don't think the slight dip in Met Board traffic would kill off the Met Board. In fact, I think the presence of a password-protected Deep End would make Eratosphere a more attractive venue for serious poets.
We might even be able to have Distinguished Guest lifeguards on duty at The Deep End at particular times--e.g., "for the month of October, The Deep End lifeguard will be So-and-so." Such temporary lifeguards would not be obliged to comment on every poem posted to TDE on their watch, but poets could post their finest work there in hopes of catching that person's eye. That, too, would increase the quality of the postings there.
However, such Distinguished Guest arrangements require lots of administrative effort--
much of it, ahem, unappreciated by the rank and file. The reason we haven't had a Bake-off around here in several years is that these events are an awful lot of work to put on, and they usually inspire multiple Sphereans to complain incessantly about the low quality of the finalists, the judge's/selectors' lack of taste, and the unfairness of how the event was conducted. Usually set to the tiresome tune of "In the Golden Age of the Sphere, it was so much better..."