In Need of Good Readers

The semester has officially come to a close, so technically my sabbatical has as well. The time away from prepping for classes, grading paper after paper, committee work, and everything else work-related was incredible. Not having to follow that routine came at a time in my life when I truly needed space to just see what happened. What happened was lots writing, lots of reading, lots of long walks with Ado, and sometimes just sitting to watch life swirl around me.

One step I took recently was to deactivate my FB page. While I find myself missing seeing what a few people are doing, I don't miss the whole of FB at all. At this point, I've whittled my social media down to the blog and the site I post my writing to for critique. Even with both of these places, though, my involvement is minimal (as you can see from the date of my last post here). I'd much rather put my time into writing the pieces that will be a part, hopefully, of my chapbook. 

This week, I've written two new pieces, both of which came from an idea that's been nagging at me for several months now. I initially thought I was going to have one poem, but the more I tried to make that one poem work, fewer and fewer words actually came to me. I would open the document, write some lines, delete those lines, try something else but nothing seemed to fit with what I was envisioning. I finally said to whatever it is inside me that has all these things it wants to say, "Fine. Just do what you want to do." Once I let the whatever take over the writing happened. The first poem kind of veered off the road, went over a cliff, and is not even close to what I had imagined it would be. I posted it to the writing site for critique, but I knew the responses might reflect readers don't understand what the poem is truly about. Of the three people who critiqued the poem, only one kind of got what is happening in the poem, but even this person didn't get the deeper effect. It's interesting how readers stay fairly surface-level when reading/responding to a piece. Or perhaps the meaning I'm seeing isn't truly there. It could simply be in my head and not in the words on the page.

The second poem, too, surprised me with how it ended up. While it does have some of the initial thoughts I had going into fleshing out the overall idea, it too, especially the ending, came about all of a sudden, as if a switch had been thrown to open the floodgate. I've posted this one to the site, but I'm not encouraged that I'll get readers who will examine the meaning. Most will take issue with sentence structure, how I've built the stanzas, and punctuation. I really don't care about any of that. I want to know if the meaning is coming through. I need an interpretation. So far, I've not gotten much of this from the people who critique.

In poking around the site, I've come to learn there are several members who post work but it's not available to the average person, like me. They tag it to keep those of us not worthy from being able to read and comment. These are the same people who won't read and comment on my work. I asked to be included in a particular group in hopes of getting to know these people and be able to discuss poetry with them, but so far I've not received any kind of response to my asking to be allowed in. Apparently, it's an exclusive club only for those whose work is deemed good enough. When I was telling Funny Delightful Son I can't play with the big kids, he started laughing. Seriously laughing hard. Then he said, "It's the internet, Mom. There are other groups. Tons of them. Join those." Who's the parent here? 

So now I'm searching for another group who might let me play with them. My hope is I actually find one that will read my work and look for meaning rather than just the punctuation, line length, and capitalization of the first word of each line (which several on the site I'm using adamantly say is a rule and anyone who doesn't cap the first word of each line doesn't know what she's doing -- yeah, that should have been my first clue to bail on this site). But, I'm in for the duration, and I know once I go back to work I won't be posting as much, so for now I'll just deal.