After reading one of Angloesque's more recent blog entries, I began thinking about some of the things that have been said to me as a writer, whether it be in workshops or amongst my peers or even from editors. For the most part, even when these people were being their most negative, I was able to take their constructive criticism in the spirit in which it was given, and their occasional scorn with grace and good nature. But of course, there is always going to be at least one thing someone has said to you that really sticks in your craw, and you have a hard time letting it go. The words that haunt me are from nearly 4 years ago, when as a young writer, I was a member of Zoetrope Online. It's true I made quite a few friends while I was there, but the person who gave me this review was not one of them. Instead, it was penned by the editor of a poetry journal, so it made what he said that much worse, as I couldn't really tell myself they didn't know what they were talking about. In addition, he was a bit of a lurker, so I had to really think that he really objected to my poem. The review reads as follows:

It's not impressionistic, it's a lot of abstraction and generalized description. An excess of adjectives also. Look at all those adjective noun constructions throughout: Yawning canyons, rocky lips, starry abyss, single sliver, glacial teeth. Pretty cliched as well (cliched here as an overuse of dead metaphor). The poem needs specific images and concrete particularities. The use of the pathetic fallacy turns this into one high rhetorical move after another. This piece strikes me as an "idea" of poetry rather than the poem itself. There's no sense of an experience here in the generalities.

To say I think it's not working would be a reasonable deduction. I have to wonder what contemporary you're reading after a piece like this. Do you read any?

Now by no stretch of the imagination do I believe that the submitted piece was the best poem in creation, or even the best poem I have ever written, but those last two lines of that review... ouch. I've shown it to friends, and ask them if you got a review like that, wouldn't it make you not want to write anymore; and most of them say yes. But for me, it would be too easy to just quit, and it isn't in my nature to do that. Instead of depressing me, it just really pissed me off. It made me want to do it even more, just to spite him, and even though it did have a positive outcome, it still pisses me off a bit even to this day.

So the question I ask my fellow writers is this... what is the worst review/critique you've ever gotten... and what was its effect on you?

SIDENOTE: Who thinks we need a "Writing" category for our blog entries?