Merciless, Brutally Honest Feedback
And other things that the road to hell is paved with...
Looking through the various publication opportunities on Submittable, I came across this chestnut roasting on an open fire:
Guess how much they charge for this service? Go on, guess! Okay, I’ll just tell you: $150! You can pay some people named ONLY POEMS $150 for them to be very mean to you about your writing and, like when you were about to tell your spouse that you accidentally threw away their passport, you promised not to get mad! They assure us in their service description that they care about poetry. So that’s good.
As a younger man I used to enjoy being snarky and cruel when giving feedback to slightly younger people than me. It made me feel like an expert, even if I couldn’t really tell you why I believed the things I said were THE only correct way. Often the “brutally honest feedback” I told people, things that were BIG MISTAKES, were arbitrary and just gatekeeping of the status quo. So much “real talk” is.
I don’t know you, ONLY POEMS, and I don’t think I will ever afford to know what you mean by “Merciless & Brutally Honest.” Maybe you got some good tips and tricks tucked away in your meanness, maybe there are people for whom the drill Sergeant approach to writing is useful. Maybe it’s a tenderness bait and switch - “I’m gonna fuck you up when I tell you that you’re enough, and you’ll always be enough, and I’m so glad you see the value in birthing more poetry into the sunlight.”
I also remember as a younger man desperately wanting the older people in my life to give me the secrets, finally, about how to be a good writer. They must have kept them from me because they were worried I couldn’t handle it and now I’ll never know. So I think I understand the market for this service.
I had one guy in a writing workshop who would read my work and say things like “have you ever worked an honest day in your life?” and “this all seems like a big ‘fuck you’ to your readers” and “how come the people of India never thanked the British for giving them plumbing?” That last one wasn’t about my writing but maybe it gives you a better sense of him as a person. When I was complaining about this guy to our teacher, Curt White, during office hours, Curt relayed to me that when my fellow grad student was in the army he got into so many fights with his fellow soldiers that the army dentists told him they could no longer fix his teeth. So much merciless & brutally honest feedback going around!1
Over the years, working with a lot of people on creative writing, I have seen firsthand, countless times, the value of telling writers at any age what you LIKE about their work. It’s not just to pump up their confidence, but it tells them what you find most interesting and memorable about what they do, and they can, possibly, look at those things as strengths for them to build from. I remember specific compliments that I have gotten over the years that literally changed the way I saw myself and how I navigate the world (not to mention how I saw my writing). Maybe it’s different for cool kids or kids without ADHD, but that’s how it was (and is) for me.
I do remember a few times where a teacher was curt (not Curt) in their feedback and it was useful. Kass Fleischer was on my thesis committee and she told me that when you hand your work to someone else to read, you better make damn sure it’s error-free. That stung because I gave her something that had a few obvious punctuation mistakes. But also, man, being a more careful proofreader certainly improves more than your typos. It is noteworthy that Kass told me that after we had been working together for over a year. If a stranger said that to me I woulda been like “FuK oF!” I also paid grad school way more than $150.
Anyway, I don’t tell writers what I think they’re doing is wrong and I don’t go hunting for things that bother me. If something sticks out as seeming to go against what that writer is going for, I will point it out, but rarely (if ever) will I do that if I am just meeting them. How the hell would I know what they’re going for? I don’t even view things as “wrong” anymore, unless it is factually inaccurate like there is no brontosaurus or all adult male Palestinians are Hamas combatants2. Then I will say something.
I looked him up and he has had a more famous career than mine but also hasn’t published anything in ten years. So I don’t know what that tells me about being an asshole.
“A senior Israeli official told journalists on Monday that around a third of those killed in Gaza so far were enemy combatants… The PA health ministry said on Tuesday about 70% of Gaza's dead were women and children under 18, but it has released no breakdown of age categories since its Oct. 26 report.” Reuters, 12.7.23. So, of the 15.000+ dead as of the week of this writing, ~33% of Palestinians killed are “enemy combatants” to the IDF and they agree that ~30% of those killed are adult males. Either the IDF is really good at sparing the lives of only adult male civilians or they are defining “combatant” as all adult male Gazans. They also were saying that their 2 to 1 civilian to combatant killed ratio was a positive thing.
What does this have to do with poetry feedback? Besides the brutality and mercilessness, nothing.