All,
Before launching into the meat of this post, I'd like to state that these are not, obviously, hard and fast rules. You will likely catch me deviating from these ideas often, but it is only when I feel like such a thing would be beneficial.
Different boards seem to have different expectations when it comes to line-by-line criticism. Recently, I joined an email group with some old friends, and I got a detailed lbl on a poem. My reaction was one of dismay. I thought, "There is a forest here, not just trees."
Which made me start thinking about lbl critiques in general. And it made me realize that I don't like them. I don't like giving them (though I will occasionally) and I don't like receiving them. I think the tendency toward giving them results in a habit of nitpickery instead of treating the poem as a coherent whole that should be judged as a coherent whole.
A friend of mine said that her problem with workshops is they assumed the poem was broken instead of assuming the poem was finished. That observation really hit home with me, and changed my approach to workshopped poems.* With that change came my change in attitude toward line by lines. I wouldn't read a novel and critique it that way--though this does seem to be a fairly common trend on this site, particularly with SPEW members. I wouldn't read a book of poems and critique each one that way. Only as an exercise would I break a poem down into its components in such a way.
So, here are my thoughts:
1. Line by line critiques encourage fault finding and nit picking.
2. Poems are more than the sum of their parts and few poems can withstand such total deconstruction.
3. Poems should be approached as if they were complete and only when that author wants more specific information should the poem be completely dissected.
4. Line by line critiques inject too much of the critiquer and do not often benefit anyone but beginning writers.
Of course, I am interested in everyone's thoughts here regarding these ideas. I'm particularly interested in what SPEW-members might have to say, and why they choose a (perhaps "nearly") lbl criticism style as opposed to an overview style.
That said, there are times when I "break the rules." I like to call out SPECIFIC lines that I thought succeded or point out flaws the author might have missed through laziness or sloppiness (two VERY common workshop errors.). Meanings of words, grammatical errors, spelling errors, clumsy line breaks, inadvertently humorous similes or metaphors, etc. etc. I also appreciate someone catching my errors while still in workshop mode.
In other words, when done well, I prefer both line criticism and overview.
What I don't like are quid pro quos, positive or negative. I've left workshops because they got too chummy. People told other people what they wanted to hear so they would return the favor. Unfortunately, this is the vast majority of criticisms and reviews given here. We can only grow minimally as long as this remains the norm. I have been called out for being "too academic" or "too professional" in my criticisms--some of you may agree with those classifications, but I do not see the problem.
I'm struggling to be a professional writer, branching out into poetry and fiction while still feeding the kitty with freelance stuff.
I prefer to winnow through all the chaff to get to the grain. Both going and coming. The fact is: I do what I do so I can grow and improve and so others, serious about their writing, whether professionals or not, can, too.
--
*Having participated in multiple workshops in my poetry career, I would like to throw out a brief caveat: by "broken" I mean the exact opposite of complete--when we consider poetry, we should think of it as being finished but in need of repair (indeed, all things could use repair).
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