These suggestions are beginning ideas on how to offer a critique on a poet's work. We'll add to these as ideas occur and bad steps leave imprints on people's backs.
General Ideas
- Give what's asked for. Don't go overboard.
- Make a sandwich. Start and end with praise for the work. Balance crits and suggestions with positive observations.
- Be sensitive. You want to help a poet improve, not stomp him out of existence.
- Offer the standard preface: "Take these for what it's worth." Or other such disclaimer that you recognize the poet has every right to kick your crits in the river.
- Register your impressions for what they are … impressions. Don't make them into law.
Specific Poetical Principles
- Take the poet's purpose into account.
- Recognize the form chosen to express the thought, and judge accordingly.
- Identify your crits by line number L1, L2, etc., if they are line-specific; if more general, use the shotgun.
- Read the poem several times, and once or twice aloud, before making any crits.
