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.
Woohoo! These are some great posts and great questions, Julie, and will definitely be thinking about responses to all of them.
Interim question: What is the overall grand purpose of poetry boards? What objectives are furthered by designing and/or establishing a poetry board?
The overall purpose of a moderated poetry discussion board is to satisfy the ego of the man/woman/child that institutes the production.
And the Golden Rule is always somewhere in there. Both of them.
The objectives have to be as different as the instigators. Some want to be up there, stick up there, high in the air. The creme .. [yawn]
The back story dream of publication without having to know how to really do it. Oh the dream. Or the control freak’s idea of heaven. The drunk’s means of having a virtual bar for friends to come to and pretend. Set ’em up, Gestalt, I need your commiseration.
-blue
“Simply knowing that someone else is out there is perhaps the biggest boon of the internet era. Someone is reading it, so write it.”
i agree with this, but with one caveat: while linking one’s voice in community with the voices of others is a beautiful thing, it should be noted by all who participate in the conversation (be it poetic or regarding any of the arts, or anything else, for that matter) that we must be careful not to fall prey to the smooth & silky narcissism that accompanies seeing your own words out there.
yes, it is nice to be read & heard, but the substance must justify the volume (i’m thinking of milan kundera’s “ethic of the essential”, here). blogorrhea doesn’t do anyone any good 🙂
Blue wrote: “The overall purpose of a moderated poetry discussion board is to satisfy the ego of the man/woman/child that institutes the production.”
I don’t know Blue. I would argue that the overall purpose of a poetry board should be to further the interests of poetry at large. Whether satisfying the egos of participants constitutes advancing the interests of poetry at large could well be argued, although when I think of some of the egos, (beginner and veteran alike) one encounters on poetry boards, I would have balk at applying your statement as a general principle.
Is there a nexus between the interests of poetry at large and the interests of individual poets? I would like to think so, and would posit that any successful poetry board needs to situate itself smack in the middle of that nexus.
Nic,
Of course you balk at applying my statement as a general principle, I doubt many proponents of forums will admit to it. They’re publications or they’re clubhouses. Either way, they’re reward driven enterprises furthering someone’s or some group’s interests. It sounds noble, ‘the interests of poetry’ and all, but it’s smoke. The interests of poetry are poetry’s problem to figure out and an audience’s right to decide.
If they’re publications, they’re guarding the cheese. If they’re clubhouses, they’re maintaining the quo.
Most of ’em do their level best to kill as many frogs as they can. Something akin to eliminating potential competitors while they’re helpless. It’s ugly to watch. As everything turns beige.
-blue
Beige-turning frog-hating cheesehoarding aside, there are times when a writer takes chances and simply doesn’t know how something will be received. A poster approaching a good board with the right attitude can get a quick gauge on an experiment.
More experienced writers need this less than ones who are just starting out, and there are workshop perils that have already been listed here and elsewhere. But there’s something to be said for learning by doing, and if you keep your wits about you, a good online workshop tops most classrooms and real-world gatherings.
You don’t have to take every piece of advice, and you don’t have to personalize the feedback. Rough pieces of information can be valuable too, things along the lines of fifteen people responded…did ANYONE get the gist of what I was trying to convey…, and there’s nothing preventing you from discounting the trolls, soapboxers, bullies and neurotics from the comfort of your own home.
Julie–I’ve been following this conversation with interest. No workshop is perfect–not in real life or on the net. (And I’ve participated in both.)
I probably spend 1-3 hours a day reading/commenting/critiquing poetry at Wild in my moderator job. I take it very seriously and I work hard to keep my own ego out of my comments.
One of the things Wild gives me is a community of poets. My life is such that I can’t commit to an in-person poetry community and most folks in my daily life start to roll their eyes when I talk about how important words are.
Yes, egos can get in the way. Yes groupthink can lead to bland and derivative poetry. Yes, there are participants who think some animals are more equal than others. Those issues aren’t limited to poetry boards, but are part of any community of people.
Wild has been an important part of my personal growth as a writer, even with its flaws.
“A poster approaching a good board with the right attitude ..” .. I suppose it’s the cynic in me that sees this as elitist code for “a newbie genuflecting correctly”.
“the right attitude” .. thus begins the indoctrination.
“a good board” .. thus begins the propaganda.
“a good online workshop” .. continuation of the propaganda.
“tops most classrooms and real-world gatherings” .. to the point of absurdity.
-blue
BB, those are cynical views, but not groundless ones. I would’t go quite that far, but there are certainly examples you could find to back up those comments in the abuses you see every day on numerous boards.
I’m less cynical, because I think the user has more control over the board experience than you seem to believe.
You don’t have to take any of the advice.
You don’t have to attach your ego to the comments.
You can, if you choose, back away from the particular crits, take a look at what they are or aren’t telling you in aggregate, and then decide if it’s a decent or a poor sample on your own.
You can chuck out everything except for the views of a single critter if you wish.
You’re free to come and go; you can set aside the whole thing for months at a time.
To me, the power structure of boards seems minimal. There’s no grade hanging over one’s head, and there are no career ramifications. It’s a fluid, pick-and-choose setup from where I sit, vastly preferable to the views of a single assigned teacher or an in-person writers’ group with all sorts of group dynamics that have nothing to do with what’s on the page. It’s hard to walk away from problems in those venues; in cyberspace, you can ignore the irrelevant stuff unilaterally.
I think the trouble starts when writers turn to a board seeking approval, and begin the process of writing backwards from that goal. It’s one thing to get a quick gauge of where you are in a self-selected spectrum, and make some assessments based on that as well as other sources. It’s quite another to start working the system, something you see too often on boards. Then it becomes an exercise in ego, rather than writing.
The claim from Blue that the overall purpose of a moderated poetry discussion board is to satisfy the ego of the man/woman/child that institutes the production is, while not necessarily incorrect, does strike me as reductive.
If we are willing to suppose for a moment that the purpose of creating a poetry board is something other than a fit of narcissism, then it may be worthwhile to entertain the possibility that the overall grand purpose of poetry boards is to create a space where discussions about/involving/somehow-relating-to poetry can take place.
What objectives are furthered by designing and/or establishing a poetry board?
It creates a chance to engage in conversations about poetry in a way that is more convenient to some people than other alternatives.
The built in follow-up is of course, why create a board specifically. If the motivating factor is the discussion, why not just join one that already exists?
Well, maybe the individual isn’t satisfied by the other sites weren’t having discussions that satisfied the person. Or maybe they simply didn’t find the one (or several) sites that would satisfy them and so just went ahead and made their own.
I think a certain amount of cynicism is natural, especially if you’ve watched most of the poetry boards out there go through their growing (and shrinking) pains.
But rejecting the entire endeavor? I can’t think of any endeavor that can’t be either good or bad, so I see no reason poetry boards wouldn’t have the same range of anything else humans touch. There is nothing about poetry that would make it uniquely able to create monsters out of regular folk.
I’ve never met a publisher (or a clubhouse president) who didn’t have a large ego. A LARGE ego. A motivating ego that was certain of its path and methodical and demanding in its interactions with people. It seems to me to be a defining trait of the species.
Dress the forums up in nobility if you want, if it helps keep the lasagna flying, as RAW used to say.
I don’t want to set anyone to thinking I’m anti-poetry boards. They’re places for people to gather to network with others with similar interests. The mission statements always sound noble and learned. But, since the software is the same across most of ’em, they all look alike – with different colors.
I know the writers’ studio forum tries for a artists’ colony look, complete with cabins. Good way to make friends I suppose.
“Hey look, we can both follow Raoul’s rules, maybe we can be friends” is a good thing. And there’s lots of it going around in this new century’s poetry. That’s a good thing.
I’ve learned over time tho’ that poets in packs are an intolerant bunch, and the first thing they do is strangle any creativity they can’t recognize. And they don’t recognize a lot.
Poets in pack have been hated since before Plato, you know, it’s true.
-blue