Which is more important?

[jdvanwijk]

I shrug when people critique my work. Sometimes the insights are flattering, and other times they're scathing. It's sometimes interesting to go from flattered to scathed in a matter of moments. While I admit that sometimes my ego is bruised by the criticism, at the end of the day I just shrug it off. Why? I write the poetry that I feel I should write. I write it the way my heart tells me to. While I would love for my poetry to reach someone's heart, if it doesn't, oh well. Write poetry for any gosh darn reason you see fit. If you want to use cliches, use them. If you want to see poetry as a symbol of life or death or~~heck~~gastrointestinal disease, feel free to do so. It's when the guiding voice within us gets drowned out by all the noise that we become what someone else wants us to be.

I'm curious. If you just shrug off critiques, why would you post on a forum like this which is critique and editing driven?

I'm curious as to what others may think of my work, but at the end of the day, I just read the criticism and go on with my day. I take both types of criticisms (positive and negative) with a grain of salt, thank those who commented for their time, and move on. What else can I do?

Hello Simatong,

I think you miss a great opportunity to learn by just shrugging off critique! It's always valuable to try out ideas by others, even if you don't agree with them at first; you can always reject them afterwards. But by experimenting with ideas by others you usually come up with new ideas of yourself as well.

I don't think a poem is less "from the heart" when we use our brain as well by the way. I feel that our job is to make the reader feel something, not to necessarily revel in our own feelings. And achieving that is in large part also a cerebral craft, honed by reworking and reworking and...