[Janice D. Soderling]

Obviously, wants and wishes differ but I would like to throw out a question relevant for the less routined writers: What do you find most helpful in the critique received on your poem?

Mind you, I am not asking what you would most like to get, (praise, wouldn't we all!), but what kind of suggestions and pointers help you go back to review and revise.

Nor am I asking what you don't want to hear, because in truth, this is not a vanity site. (Which likely won't inhibit "I don't want to hear…".)

This question of useful and constructive critique struck me this morning when I was having my breakfast cuppa with Josephine Jacobsen (and if you don't know her, you should).

Josephine said to me:

The Minor Poet

The minor poet sits at meat
with danger smoldering in his eye,
to left, to right, his dicta fly,
impaling those who blot or botch:
should any dolt essay reply
his voice goes up another notch.

Attempts to qualify are doomed.
Who could object? Which would displease?
With finger raised, in tones that freeze
he checks his points: 1, 2, 3 4.
By salad time, the very cheese
is paler, for his scorn and lore.

Wit dies before his massy frown—
until, bethinking, from his files
he fetches forth a mot, and smiles!
And not a man or woman weeps,
though each one knows that we have miles
and miles to go before he sleeps.[/b]

And because this is a tetchy forum, let me go on record here and now as a very minor poet: If any fingers are being pointed here, it is at myself (and not at you, Gentle Reader), because I do have a habit of numbering my comments (1, 2, 3, 4) and that may seem overweening.

In the long history of Eratosphere, this subject has been surely been discussed, but I haven't seen a lucid debate on it since I came to this party.

It is a topic that lends itself also to contributions from more recent arrivals. It has, perhaps, less or no relevance for the knowledgeable and routined poet-members who have established a comfortable, albeit sometimes rough-and-tumble, repartee. The rules for TDE are posted at the door. But even in the kinder, gentler forums, it is imperative—IMO—that the critique is straight-from-the-shoulder, honest, well-conceived.

Hopefully both newcomers and seasoned critters will put up some thoughts on this.

So! With the view of getting and giving constructive crits, would anyone like to offer a comment?