I understand the need to encourage and I know that criticism can really hurt. I used to love poetry, but that was mainly because I loved to talk about it. I ever tried to write some, but I through the point of poetry was to try to be obscure, like John Ashbury, and to pile strange image upon strange image until it was a grokness that people were fascinated with and tried hard to understand, although it was very difficult to decode. Ah, the folly of youth.
Now I want poetry to be as transparent as possible. I don’t have an interest in decoding anything. I want to see the story and I want the images to carry the story forward without any excess of words or rhymes or too much love of language. Language should serve the poem, but in far too much poetry it is the other way around. Yuck.
So that is my aesthetic and when a poem does not speak to me that way; when a poem tries to hide what it is about, either with the wrong tone or too much love of twisted language, or images that are there just to be images or rhymes that are tortured, then I have no patience.
I have no interest in rewriting anyone’s work and I think it is presumptuous. It’s your poem or story or painting, not mine. We are not collaborators. I want to give you some help, but if I can’t see anything, what can I do? I’ll ask you to either strip out all the useless crap, or to go back to the drawing board and start over—and tell me the story so I can see it and hear it. Then you can add all those embellishments if you want.
I’m tough and it is difficult for me to be kind, I think. I’m not a nice critic and it takes a lot of energy out of me to be a critic. I always worry about hurting people’s feelings, so I try to be ever more constructive and nice, and I end up taking myself to hell. Frankly, I don’t they I should be allowed near a keyboard. Not when there’s creativity to critique.