Feedback Forum: Active Reading Expands the Universe
Hi. I’m Ernie, for a dumb reason (literally ten thousand years of screaming) 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 series 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.
Previous entries in this series:
What to expect when you're expecting
The Deeper Meaning
How to Fix a Poem
“I can't think of any criticism on these poems. Everything is just so nice and I enjoy it so much, all I want to write is 'this is beautiful, this is so great, this is wonderful' over and over again, and I'm afraid the mods will take my poem down for not saying anything helpful. What am I supposed to write?”
If you've got a question like this rattling around in your head, it can be easy to feel a little lost on how to give meaningful suggestions for improvement. I think it comes from years of getting graded. We hear feedback and think criticism, which sounds inherently negative. Find what's wrong about this text. Fix the grammar and spelling. Uncap the red pen and take some points off. But if we're suddenly talking about poetry, there's no right or wrong, is there????????
(I also think it can be really easy to get caught up in the flow of a great poem, especially if the poet's used a lot of wonderful wordplay or original phrasing or great rhythm. If you're not sure what to look for, it can be easy to let the things that don't make sense wash over you.)
If you can't find solid ground, it's hard to find a basis on which to write your feedback.
I want to show you how asking for and giving feedback, rather than a corrective task, can be an invitation to work together on a creative project. My goal is to change feedback from a negative project – one where we take things away – to a positive project -- where we add things to the work at hand. We collaborate. Doesn't that sound like slightly more fun than telling people they're wrong?
Before we get to the actual revision strategy here, I want to put this idea in your heads:
There is always room to improve. Always. (I rewrote this essay about four times before publishing it, and I'm still somewhat dissatisfied with it.)
Poetry has this reputation as a magic art form where saints and geniuses spill out the overfull tubs of their hearts, and then they are done, and famous. Often this takes the form of a wall of text with an explanation: “I just needed to let it go/write my feelings/flow.” What's to criticize about magic? How do you improve upon unconscious perfect feeling stream?
It’s a wonderful drafting technique, to be sure – wild freewriting without self-censorship can produce some amazing, dynamic stuff – but after a poet drafts like that, they need to sit down and cut the fat. Because if you're just writing down whatever comes into your head and sharing it without so much as a proofread, that's not poetry – that’s masturbation. Poetry is for others to appreciate and enjoy.
Be deeply suspicious of anyone who tries to defend their poem with hand-waving about how art is subjective, or about how they wanted to leave their work “open to interpretation”. That just means they didn't want to make any firm decisions about what direction to take their own work. Good art is not vague. Good art is wildly specific, and the magic of good art is in giving totally different people similar shared experiences. Sloppy writing will give indistinct experiences to its readers, and leave them feeling confused or dissatisfied.
So, how do we get from first draft word-vom to sharpened purposeful poem? Active revision.
When I start revising an early draft, I underline everything that's got power, motion, energy, originality. Anything that really stands out or excites me. Those lines are always going to be the heart of the poem - the seed – the thing the poet wrote down and said “ah man this poem is gonna be so DOPE.” I do a squiggly underline on anything that seems foggy, confusing, or simply not grounded.
(When you're writing feedback, you should probably lead with what you think are power lines -- it lets the poet know that you appreciate their best stuff, and you're trying to understand what they want to do.)
Then, looking at the powerlines, start asking these questions:
a) If this is true, what else is true?
and
b) what is this poem not saying?
Question a), aka the magic if, opens the door to the crawlspace underneath the poem. If the poem mentions a door, that means there's a wall, a house, and someone to walk through them. If there's a turtle, there's a shell. If there's a kid, it's got to have parents somewhere. None of those things might be mentioned, but suddenly you'll be on the lookout for them.
Question b) helps you focus on how the poet has made decisions. Poems can connect utterly unrelated things through the magic of language. A poem could literally have anything else in the entire universe come next. A poet has to make decisions, cutting away what doesn't belong in their world, otherwise the poem would just be endless. So --why this particular image or word or line or idea instead of the literally anything else in the universe it could be?
Both of these questions, when used together, are what make revising and editing fun. You as a reader can use your powers of observation and inference to create an understanding of the universe this poem was shot out of. These questions turn you into an active reader -- you'll start searching for things in the text, trying to confirm them.* And best of all, these questions reveal places to expand. Suddenly you'll be participating in someone else's text, and giving them new places to go. You'll be collaborating.
Maybe this is all a little abstract, so let's demonstrate. If you'd like to volunteer, post a draft poem here in the comments -- it can be really irredeemibly shitty, we promise not to be mean -- and let's use these questions to find what's unique about the poem and then expand its universe outward. I'll try and hit as many of the drafts as I can, and I'll post one or two here myself and let you all write your take on them. Maybe absolutely nobody will do this but I thought I'd give it a go and see if anyone's interested in getting some practice in active reading.
*I should say that all of you are likely already doing some version of this in your heads -- my goal here is to make these questions explicit. I think it's also a bit harder with poetry when we're suddenly tossed into a language sea without the lifeline of narrative.
As always, some good feedback this week:
u/Septillion77 goes really in depth to what kind of associations the images are creating
u/CasualGangster for typing an essay, losing it by accident, and then typing it all out again by accident
u/DeusExMecha gets technical and analyzes the pace of some lines
u/IbrahimT13 for noticing what's missing, asking some good questions, and following up with a dialogue
And just so you all know that it's not just lemgthy critiques I value, I wanna give a shoutout to u/tenub, who is new here (as far as I know?) and steps in with exactly what we ask -- some observations and an attempt to explain why something didn't sit right with them.
Posted Jul 19, 2018, 11:20 AM UTC