If you could just stick a signature at the end of the post, that would help avoid any confusion. I can’t force you to use your real name, but even “Baron Humperdinck” would help everyone keep everyone else straight.

I’ve managed to lose Issue 5–immoderate moderators. Bah. I knew better than to compose it in the window.

The blog is being goofy. No idea who will ever see this.

Designing the perfect poetry board is a contentious issue. I’m going to take a couple of unpopular stands. Debate is welcome.

Resolved: A poetry board without conflict is just a teaparty.

Argument, debate, dissent, these are what force us to think about our own arguments and statements. A poetry board that stifles debate is a board that will, and should, die.

Debate stifling can be done through many avenues. Deleting posts. Banning users. Creating rules within rules. Shunning. The pressure can be subtle or intense. But when the goal of the board is getting along, the users start to go along. This is closely related to issue 2, but can be even more deadly. The homogenization of a board is its doom. Oh, it might stagger along with imperialistic efficiency for a while, but its utility will disappear.

The only way to combat argument is through argument.

Never look up the Blue Book value of a car you haven’t paid off yet. Ouch.

Designing the perfect poetry board is a contentious issue. I’m going to take a couple of unpopular stands. Debate is welcome.

Resolved: The most important feature of a poetry board is the community.

It’s not the poetry, and it’s not the crits. It’s being able to be in the same room (virtually or literally) with a bunch of people for whom poetry is something special. I think you could have a spectacular poetry board where no one ever posted a poem so long as people were talking about poetry, or being poets talking about things other that poetry. Because poetry is so damned lonely. And if you can’t get a sense that there are people behind the words, you can have a tough time figuring out where your own identity fits in.

Poetry blogs are precious to me, but they can make it difficult to follow a conversation. Things become less linear, which makes jumping in difficult. Who knows whom? Who has seen what? It’s too hard to build a community this way.

Simply knowing that someone else is out there is perhaps the biggest boon of the internet era. Someone is reading it, so write it.

Designing the perfect poetry board is a contentious issue. I’m going to take a couple of unpopular stands. Debate is welcome.

Resolved: Poets and others should be able to critique the critiques.

This is a big change for me, but hey! I like change.

Everything posted to a poetry forum should be up for debate: Rules, poems, critiques, recipes, and photographs of Great Aunt Beelzebub the Lesser Demon.

Many critiques are worthless exercises in nitpickery and general ineptitude, offered with various motives. Those offered with good motives should be glad to hear if their crit is useless. Those with bad motives should be smacked.

If a poet can’t accept criticism, I want to know that up front. Having Ruben grit his teeth and remain silent while he rejects any comments that don’t kiss his ass doesn’t tell me that I shouldn’t bother to comment. Only his reactions tell me if I’m wasting my time. If he throws a fit, I can stop commenting without having a moderator hold my hand or make a rule to punish him (there is definitely a theme here). If I still want to comment, well, that’s my own risk–I’m risking my critique being revealed as garbage. If I can’t handle that, maybe I should just shut up.

I know boards have this policy in place to try to encourage critiques, but critiquing has to be its own reward. Too many crits are lazy, sloppy, and only offered out of duty (see issue 1). The only way to hold such critics responsible is to make them answerable to the poet.

And I’ve found that usually it’s the really snotty crits that garner the most reaction. Imagine that. If you make any attempt at friendliness, it’s generally returned. When it isn’t, leave that poet to his own devices. It really is that simple most of the time.

Designing the perfect poetry board is a contentious issue. I’m going to take a couple of unpopular stands. Debate is welcome.

Resolved: Reciprocal critique is worthless.

Yes, it’s nice when someone offers comments or critique on a poem, and it’s true that some people are way more likely to post poem after poem without commenting on anyone else’s if they have the chance.

So many boards institute reciprocal critique policies, insisting on 3 (or more) crits per poem posted.

All this does is increase the number of worthless, gibbering crits offered through a sense of duty.

What’s worse, it creates a market in a sense for the appallingly bad poems that would otherwise slip to the bottom of the page unremarked. So what if Ruben posts poems and not critique. The poem is the point, isn’t it? Is generating critique an end or simply a means to an end? I say it’s the latter, with the end (hopefully, if improbably) the creation of good poems. Critiquing and criticism, and reading in general, hones the craft, but not only can’t you hone a clump of dirt, you can’t hone with a clump of dirt. Forcing people into roles they have no ability for simply creates more mediocrity, and more noise.

If Ruben posts too many poems without giving anything back to the community (which is ludicrous if the poems are any good, since that’s a gift to the community already) then people can just stop reading Ruben’s poems and commenting on them. If they feel it’s necessary to be “fair,” then they can just go right ahead and be fair without moderators forcing them into it. If Ruben writes good poems, Ruben should be welcome to post them.

In addition to the comments on the posts below, I’ve gotten a number of emails about my poetry board questions. I’m still trying to tease out some common themes, though I can say that moderation seems to be one of the biggies. That is, moderation as in personnel, not moderation as in “All things in…”

In the meantime, check out this post on Very Like a Whale dealing with the same issue.

One aspect of poetry workshopping that no one seems to be taking advantage of yet is sound. Gaz tried it briefly a few years back. I know I talked about it on pffa.

Using sound files really emphasizes the sounds in a poem. Reading your own work aloud makes a huge difference. I wish one of the big forums would embrace sound now that so many people have the ability to listen to streaming audio on our superfast internet connections.

“Halfrican-American.” It’s a concoction by the unlovely Rush Limbaugh to smear Barack Obama.

And then it’s repeated by the dittoheads and the racists… but I repeat myself.