Can You Criticize This?

Giving thoughtful, constructive criticism has got to be one of the hardest, scariest pieces of the communication puzzle, at least in the American cultural milieu. 

If and when we ever do get it, we tend to be thrown into a state of denial and embarrassment, which teaches people not to give it.  It takes skill on both ends, to give and receive, and it takes a love for honesty, growth and dialogue.  I have recently realized that there is an old incident of implied but empty criticism lurking in my past that is still affecting me today.  Perhaps you'll be able to help me shed light on it by supplying the criticism I should have gotten years ago.  I invite you to be as honest as you dare and I pledge to accept it, gratefully.

Few kinds of criticism are emptier or colder than an unexplained and unexpected college grade delivered by mail after one has gone home for the summer.  Mine arrived after my first creative writing class at the College of William and Mary in the spring of 1976.  It was a poetry-writing class and I felt like I had sweated blood for it, working late into the night on my assignments, terrified that I had no gift for poetry but wanting desperately to learn how.

There had been seven poems to write over the course of the semester, a tiny output as it seems now.  I had handed each in on time and had them reviewed in class.  I had only seldom been impressed with my classmates and heard a number of poems about writer's block, so I had grown to think I was at least keeping up with the class.  The teacher never commented on anything except for one handout that said I was good at anger and motion while warning me about writing "pseudo poetry."  Then came the C in the mail, and I had to wait till fall to ask the professor why.

She said that she would review my records and leave a note on her door, and I settled for that.  The note simply said that, upon review, my grade was indeed a C, something to the effect that my strengths and weaknesses balanced out to that.

I learned something deep and powerful about teachers who arbitrarily abuse their power and hide behind their judgments, and when I returned to college years later, I would get quite in the face of any professor who tried to overpower me with their authority.  More importantly, that woman probably helped push me into teaching with a desire to work with students to emphasize their growth and not their grades.  I have gone on to write hundreds of songs, but I have never gone back to poetry, and I find that I am carrying an emotional wound that I need to understand and release.  I want to open the old file and see if anyone can give me the criticism that helps me get unstuck, shows me where I need to grow so that I can again do so.

Here was the first poem, a class exercise based on three random nouns supplied by someone else in the class.

Writing generally precludes

The use of soap and

Though simple scratching rarely

Adventures into glass

A pen can still recall

A jumping into time

The second poem was the first outside of class, and the first to get a title.  When I recorded it in my journal, I wrote "I don't think I like it much, in spite of my tendency to fall in love with all my work."  It seems vaguely and painfully wrought, as if it reflected all my fear of not progressing in the art of poetry.

Line

God I hate standing, in this line for what I want

Shifting back and forth, my weight moves from leg to leg

All around me noise, the air's throbbing with murmured speech,

Passes in waves, m concentration's rising to fall.

I want to shove, to force myself forward in time and space-

But I can't, I have neither the power nor the will.

My feet seem to stay planted, though I feel like I'm moving.

I cannot break my place, so I must move while the line allows me.

Once I thought that a line just connected two points, the distance

Between dots.

Now I know that, but my old math thoughts are gone.

Now there is a beginning and an end; the points in between form

A line, all lines.

I hate these lines, but someday I may want to wait in them again.

For even this line must lead me somehere, perhaps to better days.

Still, time's movement is mine, and there is no repeating time.

So the voice which says hurry to gain has a point-

I only wish for a lengthened line, or the will to slow down time.

I remember really pulling my hair out over the next one, trying to find my own voice as I looked back in time.  I'd been reading Mooney's The Ghost Dance Religion for an anthropology class.  The assignment was to write in 13, 9, 10 syllabics.

Reflections on a Change at Wounded Knee

Old man, oldest of those who have seen the prairies free-

What is my fear, and what was yours?  What is

There which turns away the time between us?

Young man, I have felt the whistling prairie wind, bearing

My scent to warn a buffalo herd,

And danger's scent could not save my people.

Old man, what danger do I feel and hear you speak of?

For I feel the covered earth cry it

And the dreams of my peers seem hard to grasp.

Young man, my time is past; I linger without reason.

A new change has come to try your strength.

I cannot say that you are right or wrong,

Only that the change is hard to bear.

The next poem was the one that was called "pseudo poetry." 

Sunset's Embers

If the sun falls, flaming again

And ageing slowly, a salient flooding

Of clouds and eyes in awesome colors

Forego all thought as useless praise

But look again, as you must.

Marvel softly at the sinking sun.

Wonder later, if in the dark

It's all a picture you cannot paint

Vague though the criticism was, I think it helped me finally begin to find a stride by my fourth poem.

Walking Thoughts

Whether I'm walking through old fallen leaves

Or following a worn brick walkway,

There's never too much to see at my feet.

But someone has seen every leaf and brick;

I'm not the only one who dares glances

Then quickly looks away and down to dirt

Or leaves or bricks or anything except

The sky or trees-even an old building

Would be better than dead bricks and leaves.

How I hate to miss a face that might smile

The next assignment was anapestic tetrameter with no adjectives until the next to last line.  Of it I wrote "This subject seems so worn that it destroys the joy of writing."

Instrument

In the moment, the seconds before my fingers

Reach upward and outward for the promise of a sound,

Indecision holds them twitching on anxious knees.

When fingers will not touch them, the keys rest, kept from

The sounds they have could have made.  But no worry, they're just

Objects, plastics on wood tied to hammers, waiting

For a touch, fingers to pound or stroke with whatever skill

They have, till music comes of the keys and myself-

Responding so fully but held to music's tones.

So much response this object, an instrument gives

That I wish it could add words, harmony

To heighten the pleasure, the warm free lonely joy

Of playing by myself

And then the last assignment:

Sonnet for a Stranger

The flags are up, stuck in holes by the street;

It's Washington's birthday, or somebody's.

Home by the bus, a stranger shares my seat;

At first sight of his mustached face I freeze.

His heavy overcoat crowds me further

And the cigarette he flicks past my face

Carelessly spirals down to the gutter,

Leaving a smoky excuse in its place.

"The banks open today?" Roughly exclaimed,

I hesitate-uh-translate, realize

Mumble I don't know, turn back to the pane.

Why must I share my habits?, something cries.

And when the bus stops, he will quickly leave

Me, a stranger to myself, and naïve.

And so that is the story as I remember it.  Did I grow?  Did I gain more in the end from that poor grade than I know, by being steered away from taking poetry writing seriously?  Can you give me criticism that has any shade of depth, somewhere between empty praise and the letter C?