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Unread 03-30-2021, 10:23 AM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: San Diego, CA, USA
Posts: 8,307
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Welcome, Barry!

A few tips:

Using the word "dibs" 47 times in a single post is very distracting. The way you are using it is new to me (perhaps a Scots/American cultural gap?), and I can't figure out what you want it to mean in this context. While I'm focused on puzzling that out, I can't give full attention to what you're saying.

It seems like a verbal tic that might feel natural in conversation, but in written form it's just annoying noise obscuring the signal. I think you'll communicate better without it.

(The use of quotation marks might also be a bit excessive, for some people's taste. I spend so much time wondering why you're using them that I lose focus on your actual message.)

On forms of critique:

Sometimes rewriting someone else's poem to show what you mean is the most convenient way of communicating your point, but if you do this, it's best to do so sparingly--for example, no more than one or two excerpts of the poem at a time.

The point of workshopping is not to make the poem the best it can be. The point is to make the poet the best they can be, and that can't happen unless they struggle with things for themselves. It's like the old story of the well-meaning child kindly helping a butterfly emerge from the cocoon, only to find that the butterfly can't take flight because it needed that physical effort in order for the wings to deploy properly. So it's better to suggest possible directions that the poet might take things, rather than rewrite.

On lost work:

I've accidentally lost years of my poetry several times (which one might think would make me vow to get my backup routine more rigorous, but so far it hasn't).

I think it's a waste of effort and energy to try to reproduce what the person you were then wrote. That person doesn't exist anymore. Put your energy and effort into what the person you are now wants and needs to write. It's fine to write about the same memories as before, but understand that the resulting poem is likely to be quite different, because you are.

On signatures:

Most people here don't use them, but the tiny "guidelines" link in the top left corner of most pages on the site has handy advice on all sorts of things, like how to insert tabs and other horizontal blank spaces (which are otherwise edited out of the display so that the left margin appears flush). I would suggest looking there.

Again, welcome!
Julie

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 03-30-2021 at 10:29 AM.