I felt very free to disagree, but I never wrote back to say so, because the way the statement was phrased didn't seem to invite dialogue on the subject. But it's been driving me quietly mad ever since, and it finally broke me. I wrote and flung down the gauntlet.

In an email, Columbine pointed me to another entry. This one says: "Since I believe that poetry is an indivisible, un-analyzable, one-time statement on the part of the poet - I did and still do refuse to critique poetry beyond 'I liked it' or 'It didn't do anything for me' - I don't show those poems to other people because I don't want to have to defend them."

There are two different things going on here. I know that there are people who are in Columbine's camp, and find poetry (or any other type of art, for that matter) to be unimpeachable. But this seems like a very personal choice. I am not going to challenge Columbine by analyzing one of his poems. If someone sends me a poem, I will make the distinction clear at the get-go: "Are you giving me this for a critique, or just to read?" There is a difference of artistic intent there, and it's important to make that clear.

I've critiqued a lot of poems in my day, kids. And the main thing I want to argue against is Columbine's first statement, that it is impossible to critique poetry. It's not impossible. It may not be desirable to critique poetry in all its contexts, but it's certainly possible. And if a poet wants to be respected in the literary world, well, then it's essential. There is a literary world of poetry out there, and like all artistic milieus it has standards, damnit.

In an email, Columbine also said the following: The problem with critiquing poetry is that we have ideas of what makes a bad poem, but those ideas - unlike in prose - are completely, utterly subjective. We just don't always realize it. There is no such thing as "bad grammar" or "bad storytelling" in poetry.

I don't know how much experience Columbine has with poetry. I have a shiny new master's degree in the subject, so pardon me as I wave it above my head and say, there is certainly a such thing as bad poetry. Some things that make a bad poem: forced rhyme, sloppy punctuation and capitalization, ignorance of grammatical rules (as opposed to a conscious choice to break those rules), use of cliché, weak metaphor, emotional overstatement, tired imagery. Off the top of my head.

For instance, some poems might look like gibberish to you, but someone else (okay, me) would have the education and background necessary to say, "no, this is part of the Language tradition of poetry, and by those standards it works" or "well, here's the philosophy behind the Beat movement, and I can see what the poet was trying to get at here, although I think it's a failure on the level of X, Y and Z." Take Dada (that insane offshoot of Surrealism) as an example. Whether I like Dada or not (the same way I may or may not like abstract art, or James Joyce's stream-of-consciousness style) I can fit it in a cultural context, and at least know what the hell is going on, what the writer is trying to accomplish.

With any type of art, particularly the avant-garde, I can either "understand" it or not, but if I reject it without having tried to understand it, my opinion is sort of worthless. A well-informed rebuttal is always preferable to a knee-jerk reaction, right? A good critic will always take the poem on its own terms.

Not to mention the real sticking point for me. If you are going to say that poetry can never be criticized, if anything can be declared "art" and be rendered unexceptionable, if we can't dialogue about a piece's merits or place it in any sort of context, if we cannot make distinctions between "good" and "bad," then what the hell is the point? What can then be said beyond "I like it" or "I don't like it," and what arbiters would exist aside from popular acclamation (the same popular acclamation that brought us "Married By America")? Where does that leave poetry?

Furthermore a poem could be a bad poem by the majority opinion and yet still have significance. A badly-written story deserves to be rejected by everyone, including its author; a badly-written poem may be very important not only to its author but anyone who shares the experience described in the poem.

These distinctions between poetry and prose just don't make any sense. What if I write a short story about how I fell in love with my own great-granddaddy or something, and it's very emotional for me and all the other people out there who went through that experience, but it's very poorly written. How is that any different from a poorly written poem on the same topic? If you can criticize prose, then you can criticize poetry. They are flip sides of the same coin, and saying there's a distinction there is just specious.

Imagine that you get a student to write a revealing poem about some of her life experiences and the poem is obviously a soul-baring revelation for her, difficult and painful for her to even congeal enough to put on paper, let alone dissect. It also happens to be a very bad, sophomoric poem. Do you tell her so? Do you feel bad when you tell her so? Can you give her concrete reasons WHY it is bad?

Well, yes. (See above.) Of course there is a place for personal expression. (Between lovers, love poems are beyond reproach.) Anyone can spew out their poorly-written thoughts and cliched sentiments, and people can read on a purely subjective level, and respond emotionally, and so forth.

But in the literary world, these things would be rejected. If a student brings a sophomoric poem into a workshop, it will be evaluated and workshopped. (If it's really that personal and you're really that sensitive about it, leave it at home.) "Bad" poems are bad because they don't measure up to the standards of any accepted literary framework, nor do they innovate and break new literary ground (thus creating a new framework). And here I might as well be talking about prose. Once again, the point applies equally to both.

This may connect to the issue of autobiography. One reason I am so slow to reject my first novel is that it has a great deal of autobiographical significance to me, so I love it more than I probably should. The thing is, prose exists to inform or to entertain and is only occasionally autobiographical, whereas poetry exists mostly as a snapshot of a mood or an experience and is autobiographical more often than not. To critique a poem is often to critique the author's experience, and we are not entitled to do that. We can't say "hey, you didn't really experience that this way." It isn't allowed.

This is where Columbine really shows an ignorance about poetry and what it is trying to do. Maybe he has read a whole lot of confessional poetry, and nothing else. Poetry is mostly autobiographical? No, it really isn't. Confessional poetry (the super-autobiographical stuff written by the likes of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath) is a relatively new innovation (I think it was in the 1960s that it became a thing, and the Modernists were Not Happy about the trend). Although much of what is being written today falls under that blanket, there are many poetic traditions that eschew even a hint of confessionalism.

Moreover, even when a poem appears autobiographical (writing about a personal tragedy, for instance), the "I" in the poem is not necessarily the same "I" that is writing the poem. This is Cardinal Rule of Poetry #1, and something I tell my students on the first day of workshop. This is an assumption that a reader of poetry should never make.

And, one last point, even when a poet does mine her personal life and experiences for material, if she's not saying something about humanity, love, loss, death, life-- something that her readers can relate to-- that's emotional masturbation. That's poetry-as-therapy. And I can point to that and say, "Great that you got that out of the way, but you're not saying it effectively. Maybe next time, you should try X."

Go read Ai, who writes persona poems from the points of view of rapists, murderers, and famous historical figures. Go read The Odyssey-- is this really about Homer's personal experiences? Did his friends get turned into pigs? Read Marianne Moore, who never wrote an autobiographical poem in her life, and wrote about nature and the human animal instead. Read the Surrealists, who wrote in the code of dreams. I could go on and on about poems that aren't "autobiographical" in this narrow sense (at least not any more than any one person's art is autobiographical by virtue of their having created it in the first place).

A snapshot of the author's experience: this is only one in a long list of things that a poem could be. It could talk about issues in society; it could agitate for peace, or Communism, or revolution; it could be about death, childhood, God, music, sex, or poetry itself. It could tell the story of someone in the news, or some invented persona. It could speak in a voice that is the opposite of the poet's voice. It is expansive and multi-faceted and full of possibility, every bit as much as prose is-- saying that it can only be working to this one end (the snapshot of a mood) limits its scope to an insulting extent.

Just because poetry frequently talks about experiences we have as human beings, and frequently resonates on that level, does not mean that T.S. Eliot is J. Alfred Prufrock, or that Shakespeare in Love is a true story, and it does not mean that poetry is artistically meaningless. Because that is what you're saying when you say that it cannot be criticized. You're saying it has no objective value as art.

In other words, you've just rendered poetry irrelevant. And as a poet, I take serious exception to that.