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When Your Muse Is the Buddha

poetry

buddha

Like a lot of Americans, I find Buddhism both fascinating and mysterious. Fascination and mystery, it so happens, are great muses, which is why some of my poems speculate on such foreign (to Americans) concepts as dharma, samsara, and moksha.

Buddhist-inspired poems (loosely termed) will appear in my new book of poems scheduled for release this December, but here’s an example from The Indifferent World. In it, I tackle reincarnation as seen through samsara darkly.

Truth is, to western ears, reincarnation–getting second and third and fourth chances (á la Phil Connors in Groundhog Day)–sounds pretty good, but life, coming as it does with struggle, suffering, pain, and death, might not be the comeback bargain we think. In fact, it might be worth an escape (to a Nirvana concert or something).

By way of example, here’s one of my Buddhism-imbued poem from The Indifferent World:

Samsara

After years of meditation, the Buddha found
my problem—I cling to life,
I cannot release, I am no sooner dead
than crawling back, hours or days later,
as apparent man, woman,
fire ant, tiger, pelican, newt, box turtle,
hemlock tree, narwhal, salmon, roadside
weed. Clinging to a new womb, sac, egg, seed.
Thirsty for more warmth, mothers, suns. Crying
for the feel of water, food, breath.

Again and again, the barb of my beetle leg’s clinch,
the proboscis of my mosquito want, the bristle
of my moth antennae’s search. I crave. I need.
I suck from the marrow of my prison. I cannot
recall the womb that recalls me.

The Simul-Sub Dilemma

poetry

NYer1

Simultaneous submissions, like the Internet, are both boon and bane. They giveth and they taketh away. As a writer, you love journals that accept simultaneous submissions because they maximize your poems’ chances for publication. But…

First the little “but.” The niggling problem–a nice one to have–comes when you get an acceptance. You have to go through the courtesy of letting other markets know that the poem you simul-sent is taken. This means record-keeping. And though Submittable is a helpful tool, many markets are still mail-in and e-mail only. They mustn’t be forgotten, lest your name show up on a black list of rogue poets.

And now the big “but” (no cheeky jokes, please). Responses to poetry submissions are notoriously slow. Let’s say you’ve written a batch of poems you have high hopes for. These are your “breakthrough poems,” the ones that will vault you into such heavenly markets (both pay-scale-wise and prestige-wise) as Poetry and The New Yorker. It so happens that both of those publications accept simultaneous submissions. Yay, you say.

But hold on a minute. Yay? Really? If your best stuff becomes a simul-sub and you send it to the big boys, you know and I know that the response time from said big boys will be up around a year due to gazillions of Wanna-Frosts out there. A year! Meantime, if they’re that good, the poems are sure to be snapped up by smaller markets, ones that would not fall into your “first choice” and “greatest hope” categories. (Sound like the college submissions process all over again?)

There’s the rub. And the solution has a “deep blue sea” look to it, too, now that you think you’ve solved the devil. Let’s say you send your five best exclusively to The New Yorker. That market, tighter than two coats of paint, means the odds of slipping a poem in remain minute. Certainly less than one percent!

So the solution of voluntarily making a simul-sub market a “no simul-subs allowed” market could fail mightily and cost you a year in the life. A year in the life! (I repeat.)

What a way to make a living. And a decision.

Of course, if you generate enough poetry, sending exclusively becomes easier, so I guess that is the ultimate solution to this conundrum. Still, time and odds are not a poet’s friend. And who would’ve believed that strategy and playing the odds–such unartistic talents–would figure so prominently in the writing arc of poets’ careers?

But thanks to the odd bedfellows of writing poetry and marketing poetry, that’s just the case. If you invent a solution, let us know. And if not, I hear there’s money in building a better mousetrap….

The Upside of Negative

poetry poetry books

negpos

Negative. It sounds so…negative, doesn’t it? And yet, in the “up is down and down is up” world of poetry, negative can prove a high compliment. Ask John Keats, the wunderkind of poetry. In a December 1817 letter to his brothers, he wrote:

…and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously–I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Hmn. Sounds like the exact opposite of Walt Whitman’s Learn’d Astronomer. In fact, I wonder if old Walt used Keats’ quote as inspiration.

This is my last riff on Matthew Zapruder’s book Why Poetry, but instead of commenting on the final chapter, I thought I’d comment on Chapter 7, “Negative Capability,” because, at first glance, it looks like something a poetry editor might write on a rejection slip. But, no. Keats! What Keats would, later in the same letter quoted above, call “half knowledge.”

MZ thinks it akin to a state of reverie (just west of the State of New Hampshire, I think), a place where one can find truths due to being unsure. A Utopian state, then, for both writers and readers of poetry (the former, because the wonder is a siren call to the Muse; the latter, because it opens one up to the possibilities that poetry is famous for exploring).

Zapruder writes, “This is what negative capability means in poetry, to be in the state where you can accept a succession of things, especially if they contradict each other, in order to allow within yourself an experience that you will not have elsewhere in life.”

What I did not know until reading this chapter was Keats’ almost religious preoccupation with Shakespeare. He used the Bard as a constant source of inspiration. (And here I am, resting on decades-old laurels because I took not one but two Shakespeare courses in college–one on the comedies and one on the tragedies. Shakespeare is not a “been there, done that” kind of writer, Keats reminds us. After reading this, I have decided to embark on a rereading schedule that periodically uses the plays as an inspirational interstice between my regular reading. Once a month, or every other?)

Zapruder uses Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” as an example of the negative capability theory. “If in reading the poem you get distracted by an irritable need to come up with a consistent, coherent set of ideas that the speaker has in his feelings about the urn, an overall message about the urn, or silence, or time, or mortality, instead of thinking about the statements of the poem as a series of deeply felt, shifting, even contradictory thoughts, you will miss what is truly great about the experience of reading it. Maybe poems are not to be read for their great answers, but for their great, more often than not unanswerable, questions.”

Luckily, MZ remembers to warn us that not finding a definite single meaning to poems doesn’t mean we are free to believe whatever we wish them to mean. That is a common student overreaction, one many a teacher of poetry bangs his head against the wall over. Rather, we are in middle ground here, hoping to encourage not one and not many interpretations while staying close to the text and accepting the poet’s musings as something triggered within the realm of doubtful possibility. (Clear as muddy water, right?) Bottom line: Personal reactions are OK on a personal level, but should not be wildly and openly declared as the true secret meaning of the poor poet, who might mightily object were she present (or alive).

If the thought of negative capability is liberating, you’ve read Zapruder (channeling Keats) well. Men of Science need not apply. People with all the answers can go directly to jail without passing go. Leave the mysteries to the readers and writers of poetry. And, in the name of Keats, reconnect with your Bard, won’t you? All the truths of human nature are mysteriously there!

(And, as this is my last post on Zapruder’s book, I’d like to personally thank him for the inspiration his book provided. Thanks again, Matthew!)

Joyfully Ambushed

poetry poetry books reading poetry writing poetry

brain

One theme touched on in Matthew Zapruder’s Why Poetry is “associative movement,” a term he rather dislikes as being too “clinical sounding,” but uses anyway because its meaning is so vast that it’s hard to label and shelf as something else. What can it mean? Lots of things, but for my purposes, I’ll call it the feeling readers of poetry get when they are “joyfully ambushed.”

That term itself is associative. When I preach poetry in the classroom, I praise the value of “unexpected word pairings” — words we seldom (or, better yet, never) see together. Our first reaction, when we read them, is, “Wha–?” And our second reaction is, “But, you know what? I kind of get that, now that I think about it!”

The ambush is part one: the jolt, the surprise, the unexpected idea. The joy is part two: the caboose connection, as if the train of the poet’s thought has latched onto you at the last possible moment, and now you feel the pleasure of being pulled along by this new association.

On a larger scale, Zapruder goes beyond words and discusses how many poems “leap” from one thought to another, similar to the “monkey mind” practitioners of meditation warn us about. In this sense, poets are like hydroelectric plants on a river, harnessing the turbulent white water of their minds to create poetic energy.

A microcosm of the “leap” theory is seen in haiku. Never mind the syllable-counting so beloved by schoolchildren’s fingers, the essence of good haiku is line 3, which takes a tiny leap from lines 1 and 2–different, yet the same. A new trajectory, but in the spirit of the set-up. Zapruder uses a Basho as a for-instance:

The cicada.
Nothing in its song reveals
that tomorrow it must die.

And then a Sora:

The coastal wind
disorders above the sea
the seagulls’ wise drawings

Robert Bly even wrote a book called Leaping Poetry. Zapruder shares a quote from that book which discusses leaps from image to image:

In “Nothing but Death,” [Pablo] Neruda leaps from death to the whiteness of flour, then to notary publics, and he continues to make leap after leap. We often feel elation reading Neruda because he follows some arc of association which corresponds to the inner life of the objects; so that anyone sensitive to the inner life of objects can ride with him.

Most people think of daydreaming as the enemy, but in associative parlance it is above all an ally. You need only order these Dionysian delights with a dash of Apollonian “structured mayhem” to find “the inner life of objects,” as Bly puts it.

Metaphor itself provides such associative treats. A is like B? Readers delight in C-ing such novel connections. It’s as if they have been allowed to clamber upon the back of the poet so they can cross a river for the first time and get to the other side–a new place affording a new view and offering a new reckoning on life.

Zapruder’s book is rich with researched gems, quotes that reinforce his lines of thought. I particularly like this one by Roger Shattuck, taken from the introduction to his book The Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire:

I spoke at the start of a criterion applicable to all art: that it should present both clarity and mystery. These terms and the evaluations they permit can now by elucidated. The clarity of a literary work of art lies in its reference to experiences already familiar and available to the reader, which allow him to orient himself within this territory called art. The mystery points toward experience not yet known, to an extension of the consciousness.

Ah, yes. The old “extension of the consciousness” bit. It’s not just our bodies that need exercise, it’s our brains, too, and there is no better fitness coach than a talented poet taking us on associative leaps we’ve never experienced before. Aerobic food for thought. Eating and breathing poetry. Me, I’ll walk knowing I might be “joyfully ambushed” by such clear mysteries (or mysterious clarities) any day of the week.

That’s why I read–and write–poetry.

When Famous Poets Get Lost…

poetry reading poetry

gulliver

It’s a sad feeling, watching a poet you like slowly transform into a poet you like a little less. Or into a poet that’s a bit more mortal than believed. Or maybe into a poet that’s cashing in on his own capital, cannibal-like, over time.

The classic example nowadays is Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate and Everyman, a rare and precious combination in poetry-writing circles. Yes. Billy whose verse could speak not only to academics but to the masses. Billy who was both wise in his ways and homespun in his approach. Billy whose wit was drier than the Gobi on a sandy day (wait… oh, never mind).

These thoughts came home to roost yesterday when I read Billy’s latest (“Safe Travels”) in America’s glossiest (The New Yorker). Shall we voyage together?

Safe Travels
by Billy Collins

Every time Gulliver travels
into another chapter of “Gulliver’s Travels”
I marvel at how well travelled he is
despite his incurable gullibility.

I don’t enjoy travelling anymore
because, for instance,
I still don’t know the difference
between a “bloke” and a “chap.”

And I’m embarrassed
whenever I have to hold out a palm
of loose coins to a cashier
as if I were feeding a pigeon in the park.

Like Proust, I see only trouble
in store if I leave my room,
which is not lined with cork,
only sheets of wallpaper

featuring orange flowers
and little green vines.
Of course, anytime I want
I can travel in my imagination

but only as far as Toronto,
where some graduate students
with goatees and snoods
are translating my poems into Canadian.

It may be a bad habit, but I often wonder if famous writers’ works would see the light of publishing day if they were subject to blind readings. The opening stanza, not exactly intriguing as openers go, offers a poor play on words, first the title of Swift’s book becoming a noun and lower-case verb and second the pun on Gulliver’s name and the word “gullibility.”

Stanza two offers two British terms as reasons for Collins’ self-enforced (and Proust-like) sedentary ways.

The highlight of this poem comes in the third stanza with its alliteration and its simile (loose coins as pigeon feed), but then it’s on to Proust and the assumption that readers know the French writer kept house in a cork-walled bedroom.

What really throws me is the end. Like the opening, a poem’s last play calls for a trump card. Here it comes across as a rather random deuce. Toronto? Graduate students in snoods? And, as in the first stanza, a rather lame joke (translating English into Canadian) coupled with a lamentable tip of the hat to self: “translating my poems.”

That last grates a bit, almost as if Collins is in on the joke: “Ha-ha, look at me, famous poet using his name to take up bandwidth in the rich medium known as The New Yorker, writing poems alluding to my poems!”

Or maybe it’s mini-me, munching sour grapes on Lilliput. Acting like a Yahoo in general. And wishing I had a Houyhnhnm’s chance of horsing around on The New Yorker‘s pages, too.

Cold Comfort: Poems That Make the Big-Time

humor poetry publishing reading poetry submitting poetry

angeldevil

Reading published poems–especially poems published in the heavyweight division, where you find periodicals like The New Yorker–can be both frustrating and edifying. Before I count the ways, let me share a poem published in the The New Yorker’s Aug. 28th issue:

SON by Craig Morgan Teicher

I don’t even know where my father lives.
I know his number, and whenever
I call he answers and gives
the usual update about getting together
with the stepkids and their kids,
about the latest minor crises
with his health, about what he did
with Maryanne for their anniversary.
He lives somewhere in Connecticut,
near where he lived before.
It’s been easy not to go there, but
I know I should–there won’t always be more
time. There will always be less.
I don’t even know my father’s address.

Here’s the conversation in my head–or shall I say, between my shoulders. You know, the one between the kind angel on the right and the surly devil on the left.

KA: Wow. Heartwarming sonnet. For me, the key line is “I know I should–there won’t always be more time.” It’s a message that resonates for all of us.

SD: Clichés resonate, too. That doesn’t mean they deserve a precious three inches in The New Yorker.

KA: Finally, a poem that doesn’t leave your average reader scratching his head! It’s poems like this that can bring poetry back into the mainstream.

SD: Still, a little heft counts for something. This is prosaic, mundane, drab. Editors of lesser magazines would have given it the boilerplate rejection letter upon one reading.

KA: Did you give it a chance? Did you read it more than once? Did you note its form and rhyme? Good poetry merits more than one reading, as you know.

SD: Please. Don’t patronize me just because your shoulder is right. Rereading poetry offers its rewards, but only if there is a challenge or special beauty in the words, not if your father lives in Somewhere, Connecticut.

KA: So you’re jealous, in other words. One of the Seven Deadly Sins.

SD: I’m inspired, actually. One of the Seven Deadly Hopes. If “Son” passes muster in a big glossy like this, then surely I, too, might make a big splash in the Big Apple.

KA: I won’t begrudge you that, though I believe they closed their submissions page on July 3rd and will not open it again until the fall.

SD: Never say the word “fall” around a devil.

KA: Pardonez and moi, Sir, but it gives you that much more time to revise whatever it is you’re working on.

SD: A Shakespearean sonnet called “Daughter,” if you must know. Rhyming more or probably less. The magic number is 14. All other sonnet rules fall into the “As You Like It” department.

KA: Good luck, Son. And don’t forget to abab cdcd efef gg visit your Father! If you can match “Son,” you deserve to be published!

In Which I Critique a Book of Critiques

poetry poetry books poetry criticism

hix

The following is my Goodreads review of H. L. Hix’s Wild and Whirling Words: A Poetic Conversation. As it is instructive and a cautionary tale, I thought I would share it with the WordPress community as well:

Like writing workshop on steroids, this, as 33 poets critique each other’s work and the result isn’t always pretty. Hix’s method was to strip the author’s name from the poem and randomly select six poets to respond not only to each poem but to each other’s takes on each poem.

It’s hard to believe that this book might appeal to any but those who read poetry and those who write poetry (what many would call “the same thing”), but maybe. There’s much to be learned here, too, especially about the mysterious world of poetry. Is there “good” poetry and “bad” poetry, for instance? This book gives that notion pause.

How? Well, in many cases, a poem is lauded by one fellow poet and ripped to shreds by another. The number of times this happens is mind boggling, giving poets like me some measure of comfort when it comes to rejections from poetry journals. Meaning? So much depends on the personality and tastes of the reader, whether he or she is an editor or a fellow Goodreads poster or your spouse. Did I say comfort? Cold comfort, then.

Example, in response to a poem called “Smithereens”:

CRITIC #1: “A death wish? I don’t think so. But a poem perched on the fine line between life and death, consciousness and its absence. Obliquely I’m reminded of Emily Dickinson’s poem 465, “I heard a Fly buzz–when I died–.” This poem invites me back through its precision and mystery, its dashing and reformations. I feel, as I often do with the very best poems, just on the edge of understanding.”

CRITIC #2: “The run-on sentences and ungainly imagery (‘snow flops’) give this poem a distinct first-draft quality. Nor is the process particularly illuminating; after all, everyone dies and reenters the physical world. This poem approaches transcendence, but I need more.”

You see what I mean. One expert compares the poem to Emily Dickinson’s best work, and the next compares it to a first draft. Ouch! On the other hand, the excerpts above provide a taste of one of the book’s strengths. These two quotes are SMALL compared to most of the critiques. If you are a writer who has been frustrated with the brevity or the poor quality of critiques you’ve requested from fellow writers, this book shows how it should be done. Would I offer my work up as chum to this kind of shark tank? Boy, howdy, YES! The various responses would give grist for the revision mill in a big way.

I guess the worst take-away for me is that this book explains why so many lay readers, of which GR is representative, shy away from poetry in general. For them, the genre of poetry is often too crazy-ass confusing or oblique–everything their high school teachers made it– so it is best left to those who write poems because those who write poems are inevitably those who read poems. This is true of “modern” poetry, at least. I know some lay readers are happy to read older, more classic authors such as Frost comma Robert, hallowed be his name.

And me? If you say “J’accuse!” then I say “Mea culpa.” I liked precious few of these poems myself–and understood even fewer. Me, a practitioner of the trade! Still, it was interesting to hear the poet/critics carp. They spoke the language of poetry–in tongues, in other words. More than once I heard criticism of too many prepositional phrases, for instance. Note to self: Watch the prepositional phrases. And meter! Lots of talk about blank verse and beats and stresses.

Hoo, boy. Meter drives me crazy. I haven’t even invested in one of them bad-boys yet. Maybe it’s time to see Lovely Rita, Meter Maid, eh?

Pray for me.

H. L. His Wild and Whirling Words

A Rare Total Eclipse of the Library

poetry

library

Recently I renewed a few inter-library loan books, expecting to see the usual–a two-week bump in reading time. Instead, it was like Christmas morning. My renewal gave me a whopping 7-week extension!

Knowing technology and its sketchy reputation, I figured it was a ghost in the machine, a mistake sure to be caught and corrected by the library authorities-that-be, but a look at my library’s web site told me otherwise. The library was temporarily closing for a month or MORE so it could move to its new digs, meaning that all due dates, late dues, and fines were off. Granted clemency. Freed.

That’s right: a total eclipse of the library! (At this point, if you’re jealous, consider it a good sign… sort of like “Ice Cream Parlor 2 Miles Ahead.”)

With this knowledge, the race was on. I had 10 days to collect books from the old library before it was occluded. At that point, any books in my possession would make themselves at home for a month and a half at the very least.

As poetry books bear rereading, this would be a real treat. This meant setting aside time to scour the home library’s shelves in a leisurely fashion. It also meant placing holds on inter-library books that had no waiting lists, ones that would wend their ways to me ipso fasto–soon enough to beat the “temporarily dead line.”

Me, I am a big supporter of libraries and think they should be larger, better financed, and worthy of more taxpayer funds. Alas, too many of our town dollars go to athletic fields and programs instead, as if our children’s bodies alone were worthy of support. What about their minds?

Judge a town or city by its library, I always say. How big, how well-stocked, and how many hours open to the public.

And if the rare eclipse comes your way, giving you a book-borrowing holiday of sorts, don your glasses and look that gift horse in its shiny mouth!

J. Crew Poetry Clues

poetry word choice writing

jcrew2

My daughter, once a huge fan of J. Crew clothing, introduced me to the wonderfully-entertaining (if you like words) J. Crew catalogue. Heck with the clothes. There one would find color names that looked more at home in a biosphere than a coloring book. What would I do to be employed by J. Crew, my job not to model clothes and look good (not on my résumé in either case), but to invent creative and sales-inducing names for colors!

This all rushed back to me as I was reading Mark Doty’s The Art of Description, part of Graywolf Press’s “The Art Of” Series. In that book, Doty ventures on a side trip–a Huck Finn-like raft trip, if you will–devoted to poetry writing and the use of color. All poets use colors as part of their descriptive toolbox, but do they keep J. Crew (that famous Lake Poet manual) in mind?

“How does color get onto the page, into the reader’s internal eye?” Doty asks. “Certainly not by naming it,” he concludes.

And yet, as writers, how often do we do just that? In fact, if we use the Word function to search and highlight words we tend to favor (read: overuse), most of us are likely to see a color. For me, it’s green. Yes, I use it creatively at times, but the fact is, it remains your garden-variety GREEN.

To make his point, Doty starts with the term “the red door.” He shows how adding modifiers for different textures as a dimension can improve the description: “the rough, scraped red door.” Then he takes it another step, calling on J. Crew for some how-to:

“Readers may remember when every mailbox in America sported the J. Crew catalog, with its nouveau prep clothes, every T-shirt or sweater available in a range of colors with memorable names: pool, pine, sierra, stone. It’s marketing kitsch, but those writers knew what they were doing; the word not only makes us see the color in a way that a more straightforward name never would, but also invokes an inviting world of associations, the aqua spells of pool, the scented cool of pine. It’s an indirect way of naming, and it avoids the problem of color words that can seem as flat as Crayola hues, and tend to lead to lying anyway. When we refer to leaves as green or bark as brown, we reduce language to a debasing perceptual shorthand. Every leaf is made up of a complex interaction of shades, tones that shift as light does. Watch a Russian olive toss in the wind in sunlight!…What you see is as far from “green” as the appallingly named “flesh” of the crayon boxes of my childhood is from the beautiful variety of human skin. Even to say the phrase “Russian olive” is to bring something of the flashing, always-moving aspect of those leaves with their silvery undersides into speech, if only by association.”

This riff also brings back the basic color rule of never being obvious, repetitive, and insulting to our readers. You don’t say “green leaf” or “white snow” or “blue sky” when that is a reader’s normal association anyway. You employ color only when it defies expectations.

Or at least that’s step one. As Doty (J. Crew catalogue in hand) proves, it’s more subtle than even that. Careful modifiers and associations that might make your readers do the equivalent of clicking “Add to Cart” come into play.

Pretend you have that dream job from J. Crew, in other words. Next time you write a poem, put that cool scent of pine strategy to work!

“Would You Critique My Poem?” (Gulp!)

poetry poetry criticism

telescope

According to the prophets, when someone asks you to review their book, you make like Donald and duck (the exception being a good friend). But what about a request that you critique a poem? Tougher, as it’s such a small basket of kindness, the sort you might decline only if it’s a stranger.

But…but! If you’re up to helping a friend by reading and reviewing a poem, consider the hazards. Critiquing is not an easy basket to prepare, Red Riding Hood. There’s a wolf’s teeth worth of dangers once you jump in!

First off, critique requests usually come without specific questions. When on such vague grounds, the honest reviewer, left to his own devices, must decide where to begin. I like to start with the overall, then go to the nitty gritty.

The overall amounts to some parts emotional, some parts technical, but all considered as a whole. As a unique piece of literature, how does this poem hit me? What does it accomplish? What, pray tell, is its purpose? And once I convey that to the writer, I look closer and try to figure out the parts or techniques that were responsible for this general feeling (Part II of the critique).

Maybe I’m wrong, but I always feel like Part I–the overall effect– is the most important aspect of a poem. Still, the closer look (trees, as opposed to forest), which attempts to dig out the why’s, provides the true fodder for revision.

The key to answering these “why’s” involves the Good and the Bad technique. Usually, God help you, SOMEthing is working in this piece. Point this “Good” out by hunting down specific words, figurative language, or structural touches. that strengthened the poem’s purpose and/or struck you as powerful and unique.

Then it’s on to the “consider this” part (a.k.a. the “Bad,” which we don’t utter, as it is a 3-letter word with aspirations). As a receiver of critiques, I value “Bad” parts of a critique the most, for these are the constructive criticisms that represent one (hopefully sharp) reader’s reaction to my work’s weaknesses. The responder’s job, in this case, is to state what’s not quite working for him and why. The writer’s job is to consider it.

Considering isn’t as easy as it sounds. Yes, you can accept a suggestion, reject it, or put it on hold, but often criticism takes to task one of the writer’s babies. What, pray tell, is a “baby”? A baby is a particular line, word, or flourish that the poet-writer loves.

How crestfallen is the poet when the baby, of all things, comes under the scrutiny of a critical reader? Very. And you can bet THAT change will be put on “hold” as a “maybe, maybe not” change for future revision.

It’s like the dentist hitting a nerve while drilling teeth sans Novocaine. (Ouch!) The poet, clearly convinced that this was the best part of the poem (and often its genesis) must now realign his universe. It will take time. He may stubbornly hold (and lose the hand later on) or, in time, give the baby up with the greatest reluctance. That’s the nature of giving and receiving critiques.

Does expertise in poetry affect the quality of criticism? It can help or hurt, in my experience. Some university-trained (do the letters M, F, and A mean anything to you?) or self-appointed experts who are widely published can go overboard and get all tangled up in their own advice. As Whitman would have it, they come off as “Learn’d Astronomers” who look at heavens clouded by pride. Leave these good “professors” to their telescopes. You want people who just enjoy stars.

And it goes without saying (but I’m going to say it anyway because I talk too much) that second and third opinions are a great help. But yes, this is assuming that good poetry critics are easy as New Orleans and as plentiful as mosquitoes during a rainy spring.

Let’s agree on this much: Criticism is a fine balance of subjective and objective, brain and gut. Not everyone is good at it, but if they are and if they’re willing, they are invaluable poetry friends and you owe them in kind, if they write as well.

Good critiques take time and effort, after all. Going through the motions doesn’t fly.