As the Moon Climbs

A gray language stretches across the landscape,
straight lines and whorls maintained by metal
cages that crawl and race and rest
now and then to free their prisoners for a time.
New graphemes are added almost daily
between existing characters, a semiotic evolution
straining the bounds of understanding.
Some parts are lit at night, some dark
except for lamps on the scurrying cages.
Topography seems irrelevant, signs passing
over rivers, through forests and deserts,
in and out of the inhabitants’ hive clusters.
What is the message, that they expend so much
energy to create and sustain it? And for whom?

I’ve been critiquing creative writing in various forms for a pretty long time. I don’t say that to establish my credentials, but to explain that I have been around the proverbial block like a bus driver. I know the potholes, the cracked curbs, the overgrown lawns and the omnipresent graffiti. I see the same people getting on and off at the same stops–the kid with headphones riding to school, the lady in a suit whose heavy perfume can’t mask her sweat, the old guy whose daily victory is making it up the steps without his knees giving out. Sometimes there’s an accident mucking up traffic, or a passenger gets uppity, but mostly it’s the same thing over and over. Good writers rarely start out good, and if they do, they probably aren’t on the bus, they’ve got a car and they’re driving themselves around.

But enough with the belabored metaphor. The thing is, for every burgeoning writer who wants help and criticism in order to get better, there are ten, twenty, maybe a hundred others who want their egos stroked. There is nothing wrong with writing something for yourself, or your friends, or your therapist, or any other reason that your bloody viscera desires. But if you ask someone to critique your work, ostensibly so you can improve it, then by golly gosh darn you’d better be prepared to have a sunshine enema, sweetiepants.

With that in mind, I present to you the most common responses of wannabe writers, when confronted with criticism:

1) You just don’t get it.

There are two ways this can go. Either yes, I certainly do get it, because your poem or story is about as deep and nuanced as a playground argument; or no, I don’t get it, because your work is so obscure or vague that there is nothing to get. Questioning my ability to understand your writing does not actually improve your writing. Assume that unless I tell you that I don’t get it, I do. And I still think it needs revision.

2) It’s exactly how I intended it to be.

I can intend for my lasagna to taste like dog poop, but my husband still won’t eat it. Go figure. Intent is useful to consider when revising, in that writing is generally meant to communicate and so you may want to work on getting your message across better, but you don’t get to mandate how your reader interprets something. If there is a disconnect, and you don’t like it, you’re the one who needs to make changes, not the reader. And if you intended that your work be dog poop, I’m not sure what to tell you. Not to mention, why are you asking for critique if it’s everything you want it to be, and more?

3) You’re too narrow-minded about poetry/dialog/plot/whatever.

You’re not narrow-minded enough. We can all sit around and argue about what constitutes a poem, or how normal people talk, or how experimenting with different colors and typefaces is so totally edgy, man, you don’t even know… or you can accept that standards exist, and no amount of whining about where the goalposts are will turn your bad kick into a field goal. Look, you’ve made me use a sports metaphor. Terrible.

4) You have no feelings, so you can’t feel what I feel.

It’s true! I’m actually a complex computer program that my creator has unleashed on the unsuspecting amateur writers of the world. If I had feelings, I’d be watching Lifetime original movies and signing petitions to end animal cruelty. Guess I’ll go back to the binary bar to hang out with the other internet outcasts: Viagra spam and MySpace.

5) You’re being mean because you have personal issues.

Your tears and impotent rage are my champagne and caviar-stuffed lobster. I spend my little spare time seeking out terrible writing and critiquing it because my parents never hugged me when I was little. ALL I WANTED WAS SOME LOVE. WHY YOU GOTTA MAKE ME HIT YOU, BABY?! My “personal issue” is that I have this delusional hope that I might be able to help people. If you don’t want my help, jog on.

6) You’re not an authority, so your opinion doesn’t matter.

My dad has a saying about opinions, but it’s not suitable for mixed company. Suffice it to say that everybody has them, and indeed, some can be more valid than others. But my credentials, or lack thereof, don’t automatically render my opinions right or wrong, anymore than your credentials, or lack thereof, automatically make your writing good or bad. Your work isn’t only going to be read by people with a degree in whatever you deem worthy to make them fit judges of your work. You don’t get to hand pick your audience like a bouncer at a bar letting only the beautiful people in.

When someone critiques your work, maybe you feel attacked and hurt and angry and all sorts of other unpleasant things, but take a step back and recognize that the person may not know you very well, and/or is very unlikely to have a personal vendetta against you. They are probably not out to show how amazing and awesome they are by putting down your work. People are trying to give you honest feedback, and you are rejecting it because you don’t like it. Bad idea.

Should you take every criticism to your bosom like a cuddly asp? Of course not. But listen to what people have said, whether you like it or not. Step back and try so see where they’re coming from, and then decide whether to use or discard what they’ve offered to you. Try to consider each criticism carefully, especially if more than one person has offered it. Be just as wary of the person who says “It’s great!” as the one who says “It sucks!” because neither statement is helpful.

And always, always remember to thank the bus driver when you get off at your stop.

for Simon

He sat in his dead car and drank
one beer after another
like a chain-smoker going through a pack.
Headlights became taillights, the moon
averted its eye from the highway
to give him some privacy.

He needed to get home to his kids,
his wife, her blue eyes, her head
bare and smooth, round as her stomach
eight months along. The doctors
said she had the best kind of cancer,
her prognosis was good, but then
Russian roulette had good odds, too.

He couldn’t afford a tow.
School and part-time work were enough
unless something went wrong,
like having to pay for chemo
when you had no insurance. Like your damn car
sputtering to a stop five miles from town.

The beer was warm. He put
each empty can back into the case.
Maybe someone could read the dregs
like tea leaves, tell him whether
this time next year he’d have
a house or a spare bedroom with family,
a car or a bus pass, a wife
and a baby boy, or two graves
and a drinking problem.

It was easy to tell him to work harder.
Easy to call him lazy or stupid, to condemn
his wife and unborn baby to death
for the crime of being poor. It was hard
to sleep at night, wake up
and smile at his kids over breakfast.

It was hard to stop drinking,
get out of the car, lock the doors,
start the long walk home in the dark.
It was hard to see the white line
dividing asphalt from dirt.
It was hard. He did it anyway.
He was the bullet in the chamber
wondering when the spinning would stop.

My poem “Memory Is Defined by What We Forget” has been added to The Semaphore Anthology, a compilation of some really nice poems curated by Samuel Peralta, a.k.a. the (in)famous Semaphore. Check it out, if you didn’t read it back when I wrote it. If you’ve already read it, do it again; it’s better than you remember*. Also, we have it on good authority that penguins can fly**.

*The validity of this claim has not been verified by the appropriate governing body, and is unlikely to be subjected to reasonable scrutiny in the near future.

** No, they can’t. They get really antsy as soon as they step into a cockpit, especially if they’ve been drinking.

In the sepia picture she wears a bathing suit,
sits on a metal railing, posed like a model. She smiles
with her mouth closed, her hair half-pinned
and half breeze-blown curls, legs long and lean.
She presses her face against my grandfather’s hair, and he
bares his teeth, arm around her shoulder.
They are thin and relaxed under the morning sun.

Below them, the Caribbean waits like a pistol
primed to start a race that he finishes first, leaving her
a refugee burned blood-brown on a raft
adrift in her own mind. Now she smiles
with her mouth open, but her teeth
have been false for years, and she says
they hurt her all the time.