Feedback Forum: What to Expect When You're Expecting

Hi, ‘bout time I introduced myself. I’m Ernie, for a dumb reason (series of typos) my handle is u/dogtim. I have been an editor and writing coach professionally for the past ten years, and a writer for ohhhhh just about forever.

I’ve put this post together to help beginners give feedback. As you’re likely aware, we require everyone give two thoughtful responses to other poets on this sub with every poem they share. The point of this exercise is twofold: it is to help you improve your powers of observation, and to help others understand how their poems affect their readers.

But if you’ve never really been a part of a community like this before, it can be daunting to offer your responses to other people’s deep dark feelies. This essay series addresses some of the most commonly asked questions about feedback that the mods get.

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New poets often feel like they haven’t read enough poetry to be able to offer their perspectives. "How can I give feedback when I don’t know anything about poetry?” they cry. “I’m not qualified to give critique!

I think it’s a lot of scarring from high school English courses. If this sounds like you, FEAR NOT! No matter your experience, you’re way more qualified than you realize.

Writing – all writing – deals with managing reader’s expectations. The writer’s job is to promise something, and then deliver the goods. The most basic expectation of all writing, of course, is that you’re not going to waste the reader’s time.

Before you read a book or watch a movie, you already have a rough idea what to expect without knowing a thing about it. You’ve been watching and/or reading all sorts of things — The Hunger Games, Netflix series, yogurt commercials, erotic novels, football matches, Instagram stories, thrillers from the bargain bin, erotic yogurt commercials -- your entire life. You are already an expert at picking up on contextual expectations.

So where do we get these expectations? How do we get so much before we even start?

Context gets determined by the rhetorical triangle of purpose-audience-genre, i.e. who is it for? what is it supposed to do or say? what’s the style/language conventions it should be following? You are peripherally aware of those three contextual bits, and they inform you what to expect. They form the most basic parts of the author’s promise to the reader.

When I pick up a corporate memo, for instance, I expect to be given a bunch of businessy information which will help me make decisions at my job for the rest of the day. The context of purpose (to inform), audience (perky office drones), and genre/style (memo using business vocabulary) communicate those expectations before I’ve even read it. When I pick up a fantasy novel, I expect to be entertained with an epic narrative of good and evil, hopefully with orcs. (Purpose is to entertain, genre is of course fantasy narrative, audience is what would have been called “nerds” probably 30 years ago, but let’s be real, Star Wars and Harry Potter are billion-dollar empires and about as mainstream as it gets.) It's unusual and memorable when something breaks context. You would be very surprised and disappointed if you picked up a book called Game of Thrones and got 800 pages of mandatory HR training about how to synergize towards more effective solutions.

But poetry is a bit fiddly, because we're exposed to far less of it by accident. So we often lack poetry expectations in terms of context. But then again it’s pretty easy to guess what we’re in for based on the title and the first few lines. (this ties into Lana’s recent Poetry Hacks essay, Imagine the End). If I start a piece “once upon a time…” you expect to hear a story, or a nursery rhyme. If it starts out “something terrible happened yesterday,” we expect to hear what that terrible thing was and why it was so interesting. If it’s “YO I’m the hiphopopatomus/my rhymes are bottomless” we expect to hear a dope flow. (which is why it’s so funny when the rhymes are not in fact bottomless.)

When you read poetry here or anywhere else, I encourage you to take what you already know from the context and make it explicit to yourself:

• What is the purpose of the poem – what did the author intend me to get out of this? To make someone laugh, to make someone sad, to explore an idea, create some images, ask a question, tell a story, make people think, to play a language game?

• Each poem goes to an audience – you’re going to write a poem differently you know that it’s for your friend, your lover, or the great wide internet dumpspace. What kind of social group does this author belong to? What communities? Would it be best read in a bar, in bed, or outside? Try to guess who or what group or which published format this poem was meant for — that could mean anything from a professional journal to a private Instagram.

• Genre or Style – What’s the tone, the voice, the form? Is the language heightened, or is it everyday? Even if you can’t name the qualities of a more structured form like a sestina or a sonnet, the style and register of language should be clear. I find the vast majority of poems posted here are what’s called “lyric” poetry, which is most simply defined as personal emotions and reflections on a subject. Often poetry here takes the form of hip-hop lyrics, slam poetry, or short lil stories.

How to translate this into good feedback:
So now read the poem and ask yourself: was the poem about what you expected, or not? Did the author give you the experience they promised? Did they deliver the goods? If everything feels on point, then the context matches the result. If something feels off, you might be able to isolate something in the context that led you to expect something else. Tell the author what you understand the audience, genre, and purpose of the poem to be, and measure where the poem landed with respect to those targets.

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Aaaaaand that's all for this week. Tune in next for more handy tips on writing good feedback.

This is titled "feedback forum", so I'd also like to ask to hear from you, as well: What sorts of expectations do you all bring to poetry? What context are you imagining? And of course, what are your questions about writing feedback, and what would you like to see addressed?