Workshop expectations

[aschueler]

i think the take it or leave it advice above is good advice though i would say if you're always leaving feedback and not editing you're on the wrong site and needlessly beating yourself up .

I've done some editing... But not much new stuff lately.  If that was meant for me 

[ellajam]

i think the take it or leave it advice above is good advice though i would say if you're always leaving feedback and not editing you're on the wrong site and needlessly beating yourself up .

I've done some editing... But not much new stuff lately.  If that was meant for me 

There is no rule saying you must edit, or even that you must post your own work. I read billy's comment as aimed at those who defend against critique rather than considering and discussing it. Members who prefer to use the site to read poems and offer critique, and just interact in general on threads like this, are great to have around.

[RiverNotch]

I'm pretty sure there are poems which deserve the trash can; the problem is according to what standard? Most poems have equal rights to, say, Facebook, Reddit, or even the New Yorker (blah! I actually like that mag -- intro'd me to Alice Munro), but then what exactly are we looking for in a poem here, if not *quality* -- and if one, say, has a life, or at least a publishing deadline, then one cannot be expected to bring to quality every little thought in his or her head. Of course, this leads us to another question: how do you know what's the standard? Novice, Mild, and Serious may be enough for defining thoroughness, but when we take into account the poet's editing skills or amount of time, issues may come up -- I usually assume a person has as much of an attention span as me without the occasional attachment, so that a poem isn't worth working on if it demands, say, anything more than two weeks straight, but that might be the wrong assumption.

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I think it's not only a realistic expectation, it's a simple fact of life that anything a person works on, a person ends up getting attached to -- but it should be obvious that a "workshop" implies an aesthetic battlefield, one where viciousness needs to applied when something really is that deficient, and yet such viciousness is never personal (however much personal pleasure the critic -- the regular human being -- gets from the knife). You don't actually need to acknowledge that a person worked on their poem, that this is all just business, that blahblahblah, you just need to be as honest and thorough as the forum demands it: function over form, if you will.

And as for me, I guess I'm as much determined by impulse as I am by thought, so that sometimes I get overthorough (and thus, overvicious) in the Novice forum, or I respond to crits in ways that really aren't as constructive as they should be (usually rectified by the edit or the abandonment), but that's another point in not leaving here -- we're all just working on it. That is to say, it's handy to have expectations, but it's typical to not follow them -- the point is, we should still try, and try more and more (perhaps even succeed more and more) as we go along. Maybe thirty years from now, I'll be a proper saint.

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And as for defending, yeah, it gets pretty pointless if you just defend and not edit, but usually defending is a force for good, especially if it's against an especially big point. The point is that the crit has to lead to a change of mind, not necessarily a change of poem -- if you refuse to look at the critic's point of view, then this ain't the place for you. It just happens that editing is the best evidence for that.

[billy]

you never came to mind but you must feel a bit guilty to mentio it

i think the take it or leave it advice above is good advice though i would say if you're always leaving feedback and not editing you're on the wrong site and needlessly beating yourself up .

I've done some editing... But not much new stuff lately.  If that was meant for me