RK: One of the criticisms that I’ve seen on Twitter is that you’re just holding up examples of “bad” poetry by well-known poets (well-known at least in the Indie Poetry Community–Schomburg, Laskey, Limon, Abramson, etc)– ie, you say stuff’s bad but you don’t say why. you don’t offer any real thought or critique. how about, then, taking one of the examples you’ve posted and breaking its “badness” down for us ???
WNP: Well, the short and simple answer to the “no critique” approach that we’ve taken is that Twitter doesn’t allow for much wiggle room. We often find ourselves struggling to fit the quoted poem excerpt with a link (or the name of the poet/journal) in 140 characters. And considering that this was a spontaneous venture, we haven’t yet looked into moving the format to a website platform, though that is an option.
The reason why we tend to poke at “established” writers is because they have more than likely accomplished some very special things, whether that means publishing a (or many) high-quality book(s), attending/graduating from prestigious writing programs, publishing in impressive journals/magazines, etc. And we believe, in the instances we’re pointing out, that they are not working to their full potential, which we think is unfortunate. Also, we think they can probably take a punch from some anonymous Twitter profile. Their careers will not suffer because we took a screenshot of their latest poem in X journal.
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