Kevin Rainbow,
I have no interest in falling out with Andrew or anyone. Andrew advised not to join PFFA. I advise that you should. The moderators can be cutting, but I have never seen any of them being rude. Can you provide evidence for this accusation?


Julie,
Related to your great post.

http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/member...grasshopper-uk

The evidence is sprinkled throughout the archives of the site. This is just one of myriad such samples of their lovely imperative-slinging way of treating new posters:

http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showth...nal-Sentiments

Those were the days.

(Anyone remember Blue Bicycle?)

David R.

Doesn't it all depend on what you interpret to be a fair critique and what you interpret to be rudeness? I think that Garryg's critique was fair, and gave advice that the poet in question should follow. Eratosphere is, though more active than pffa, less inclined to receive bad / badly written poems. Therefore, it isn't as harsh.

Without "Read fifty thousand poems before you attempt to write another one." I can maybe understand supporting the critique, but to me, that line reads purely as an attack against the poet, rather than a comment on the poem.

From my own experience . . . early on, I posted this critique. It was deemed so deficient, that Howard banned me from ever posting in High Critique again. No opportunity to improve or advice on how to do so, just an instant ban. In contrast, JohnBoddie would get away with single sentence critiques in that same forum.

Yes, there were some fantastic poets and critters at PFFA when I last frequented the site, but there was also a lot of destructive behavior from the people with the most responsibility to be constructive.

Yes, yes - I remember The Blue Bicycle (and the why of it) and Dr. Whup-ass.

I had a look at PFFA and found it helpful to stand back and look at a board with which I have no connection, a pie whose juices have never touched my poking fingers. To see how little in-jokes and mannerisms that must have developed over quite some time become litmus tests and shibboleths to sort sheep from goats and wetbobs from drybobs. It's how boards become, like whales.

See us, withour lariats and bake-offs, and the need to learn the special currency of the Sphere before we can spend it confidently in the wider forums.

I once took part in a teambuilding weekend with a load of young Turks from medium-sized Pharma and high-ish level Catering and we did an exercise called "steering and joining". I was the one of the steerers and I eventually stood up and yelled "Listen to us. We are behaving like idiots and we owe these people (the joiners) an apology". I thought I'd blown it but the rest of my team listened and we scored top points.

I know that my posts in general discussions often seem to be of doubtful relevance and are as often politely ignored, but when I see something that feels wrong, I have to put in my pennyworth. Which, in this case, is this.

Why would somebody join a ship, then run to the rails and start taking potshots at the others in the harbour? It bothers me.

As you were - there are some good points being made on this thread.

Ann is right. I do not want to upset or offend anyone. I think I owe much of my (doubtful) critiquing ability to pffa, so some loyalty is involved. But yeah, I get what you're saying, and I am not blind to it.

Are the bakeoffs still running? They looked fun.

Poetry boards, families, churches, workplaces: no group is free from petty I-have-more-social-power-than-you gamesmanship. Some groups tend to be better than others at dealing with the negative stuff.

But the culture of a poetry workshop can change quite a lot over time. As Heraclitus said, you can never step in the same river twice, and the same community of people is not here even from day to day, let alone from year to year. Eratosphere under the Editor from Hell (see an excellent essay on that part of Eratosphere's history here) was not the same Eratosphere as now, for better and for worse.

I feel uncomfortable criticizing any other poetry workshop's vibe, knowing the sort of gratuitous, frat-style hazing that sometimes went on around here, for years. There was enough positive interaction to offset the negatives for me, but many other newcomers who might have been valuable contributors to this online community decided they didn't need to put up with abuse and humiliation in order to learn how to become better writers. That's our loss.

That said, we've been a little too gushy around here lately for my taste. (And yes, I realize that I have a pot/kettle problem, having just gushed uncritically in Jan's thread on Non-Met.)

Thank you for acknowledging this; it was my loss, too. Though I lasted longer here than at PFFA, similar moderation eventually produced the same results.

I don’t quite get your post, Ann. Since I almost never find you irrelevant people And I often find your posts the better of the batch I could not help responding. The amount of banning they do and the absolute censorship of dissent coupled with the unbelievable arrogance of that schmuck Howard makes it a horrible forum in my opinion. Some poets here like Matt are able to make it work and more power to them but the control of speech I ran into there was pretty strange.