Reviewers Anonymous

Sorry, have to debate the sweeping general comment that brutal and harsh is the path to cleansing our souls and sweeping the bad writers off our side of the street...

Novels, short stories - I bow to your expertise. Personally I RARELY have found a tale which didn't bore me by the second page. My fault? probably - daydreaming or examining an author's sentence structure is a bad habit with me. Years ago reading "The Thorn Birds", I was mesmerized by the first three pages. I read them over and over again, marveled at every sentence, every image, every phrase. I was so intoxicated...I never finished that book. I seemed spellbound by that author's brilliance of language.

i mention Poetry because it is so much NOT prose. It is surely the most difficult, most personally painful of all of writing. There is no hiding, no long passages of meadows, and wheat, and the time of the breeding, or (per Michener) the history of the formation of Hawaii. Great Poetry is immediate, concrete, able to affect a generation 300 years from now. Brief, lengthy, structured, unstructured, poetry is "out there", fleshy, pock-marked, bitter, lines, phrase which stand naked and must hold up. As a writer and reviewer of Poetry, I don't count, "BRUTAL, HARSH, DEMEANING, PATRONIZING" as even remotely in my tool box. I am quite willing to say, "Hey, you know this poem is terrible",. BUT, not all subjects/devices/fancy language sings sweetly in every poem.

I tell my people....trash that horrid, bloody poem...........let us begin at the beginning with word exercises etc.

JMO