so you're not up to it.

[Leanne]

I left my last poetry site because it had turned in to nothing more than a saccharin sect of sycophantic self-congratulatory saddos. It all started to go wrong when the crits, not the poets, started to use those hackneyed horrors...awesome, wow and blown away.

That is exactly the thing that has driven me from site to site for the past ten years or so -- despite some quite good writing on most of them, the sycophants invariably seemed to take over and even the better writers came to prefer a pat on the back to a kick up the arse. Not I -- when boot may liberally be applied, let it be so!

My vision for the site has always aligned with billy's in this, I believe. Billy wanted to create a site where poets would receive honest, constructive and useful feedback no matter what their writing ability, in order that they may improve. Nobody is beyond criticism. Being afraid to say something honest to another human being is a terrible way to live -- and being the person to whom others are afraid to speak honestly must be a miserable existence under all the sugar and fluff.

Encourage those who are learning, certainly, but do not enable mediocrity. Poets stroking one another's egos is nothing more than mutual masturbation, and just as fruitless.