This post requires some self-reflection. (On my part and of me, not of you, reader.)
We all benefit from honest critiques of our poems, and by paying attention, we can also benefit from critiques of others' poems. (Which is why it's always a good thing to read literary theory and criticism, if you're a writer, especially when the criticism provides concrete examples.)
But a critique, like honesty, can turn sour and counterproductive when applied at the wrong time or too zealously or without careful consideration.
A case in point.
Today, during our Wednesday discussion of a poem, I was too strident in my critique, more specifically, of one figure in the poem. I noted, as others had during the discussion surrounding this poem, that the poem suffered a weak closing, ending on a couple of short lines that, in my opinion (and this is important - it was only an opinion) undercut the rest of the poem.
We've discussed often how poems end and, more to our purposes at Wednesdays@One, how to end poems. (See this post in 2018 for some of that discussion.) Bringing a poem to an end can be a hard thing to do because we tend to think of closing lines as a summing up, a kind of re-statement of what (we, the writer, think) the poem means. It's hard sometimes to know when to leave off. Should the poem culminate? Should it conclude? Should it sum up? Is it okay to just stop, as if in mid-thought? Should our ending raise new questions or introduce new information of some kind, and then end there?
The answer(s) to these questions depends on what kind of poem you're writing. Are you writing argumentation divided into lines? Shakespeare did that, and so did the Metaphysical poets. In fact, a whole lot of Modernist and contemporary poetry is really argument in verse.
Are you making un objet d'art, that is, a verbal icon, a work of art that happens to be built from words? In which case, rhetoric (i.e., rules of argumentation) hardly applies; you can end the poem any way you like. (Some people who think of poetry as rhetoric cast into rhythm and rhyme, sometimes call these kinds of "art poems" "fragments.")
When you're creating a work of art in words, where the emphasis is more on sound, rhythm, association, juxtaposition, stress and rest, relations among words and between words and their sounds (that is, less on idea, argument, reportage), it's not always easy to know how or where to end. At what point is this kind of poem complete?
I've suggested a technique for ending poems, especially these more "poetic" poems, in the link to the 2018 post above, and on Wednesday afternoons to my colleagues from time to time. Keep reading "back up" the hill of the poem you're making, toward the first line or first significant image and consider returning to that language or set of verbal cues, echoing it as a way of closing your poem.
And this is exactly where I went wrong in my critique of this writer's poem at today's salon. For he did exactly as I've suggested: he simply repeated the title of his poem as the last two lines . . . with an exclamation mark, no less!
The effect, I meant to express to this writer, was a kind of melodrama, not because of the exclamation, necessarily, but because of the Big Reveal. This ending was the writer's way of telling the reader what the poem is about, the "meaning" of its title, which he meant to make meaningful by repeating it at the end, just as if he'd brought you, the reader, to the pot of gold of his poem.
There's an aspect of power relations in a poem, developed usually through point of view, in which the writer directs your readerly attention through the poem to its conclusion. That directing can be quite sensual and concrete (and satisfying for the reader!), such as when the visual imagery of the poem invites your mind's eye to look up, look down, look far, look near, look broadly, look minutely, and so on. The poem provides perspective, and you read along. And the writer controls it. That is communal.
But there's also an aspect of power relations in a poem in which the writer tries to tell you what his poem means as he's telling you the poem. He inserts himself between you and the language of the poem, just in case you're not "getting it," incorporating his paraphrase of the poem into the poem. This kind of power relationship betrays a lack of trust either in the reader or in the poem. That's autocratic.
And that offends me when I sense it in a poem.
And THAT is where my critique of my writing colleague's poem went off the rails. I even said, in critiquing the poem, that this writer must think I am a moron not to "get" the point he's making in the poem, so much of a moron that he feels he has to repeat the title in the last two lines. And add an exclamation for emphasis! Of course this writer does not think of me as a moron. The ending to his poem may be nothing more than the Big Reveal to himself. (!) No, what made me the moron in this discussion was my own critique.
The poem was a bit clumsy. My critique was clumsier.
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