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.
Let’s call ’em crits cause they never seem to rise to criticism. Besides, criticism of a single leaf is almost worthless.
Crits in a moderated board are supposed to facilitate community. And they do. And eventually, a homogenized one. Not something one really wants in a pack of writers, is it?
Clubhouse are cliques are covens of convenient followers of the party line, and sometimes stiflers of growth, ya know.
Maybe that’s “all times” ..
Just what I want from an audience, comments based on reciprocity? Now isn’t that approach always left begging for a psychiatrist’s couch?
And to control things, moderators and rules, to go with the begging for something more like meat in the responses, and keep the coven at least civil with one another. Censorship of the angry? Don’t you ever rant in your writings? What is it with clubhouses anyway, take all the fun out of flyting.
Out on the commons there aren’t any moderators, but the commons are a ‘laughing stock’ and too dangerous for the meek.
-blue