I wrote what I thought was a really good poem but my professor hated it

Honestly it isn't at all a bad poem. The only thing that prevents me from looking at it as a poem in the way it should be looked at is the noise around it

the last four lines of each stanza are good and everything else is terrible garbage

I'm not even bothering to read the notes. Anyone who gives that many criticisms is insecure about being a failed poet. He probably thinks it's really good and got freaked out.

>if they don't praise me, surely they must be something wrong with them!

You are a joke.

Your professor is a moron, your poem has some good ideas, but his criticism does not really instruct you on how to fix how wordy and sentimental you can sometimes be, I would pull your writing back a little, here i how I would edit your writing.

"I gave birth to moonlight
You read it; scrawled neon across the black
You could find it everywhere: disappointment
Thrown down to trace your foothills

Your nature pierced my pumping organs
sketched over everything known to man
steam rushed through everything,
all while giving a crackling stare,
all the way down sun snuck
Through out windows that we boarded up
He hit his flint and your face sparked

I yelled out, and you stopped
We reached Marfa.
One honest day up on this free pole
They devils are not done digging
He’s speaking in tongues all along the pan handle
The corrosion of his speech is spitting dust in
My eyes

I’m drunk on your leftovers
And so I look down the pike
Every twitch, your hand drum salute
it then salutes mine."

Sorry, few spelling errors in the post I forgot to fix

"I gave birth to moonlight
You read it; scrawled neon across the black
You could find it everywhere: disappointment
Thrown down to trace your foothills

Your nature pierced my pumping organs,
Sketched over everything known to man
Steam rushed through everything,
All while giving a crackling stare,
All the way down sun snuck
Through our windows that we boarded up,
He hit his flint and your face sparked

I yelled out, and you stopped
We reached Marfa.
One honest day up on this free pole
The devils are not done digging
He’s speaking in tongues all along the pan handle
The corrosion of his speech is spitting dust in
My eyes

I’m drunk on your leftovers
And so I look down the pike
Every twitch, your hand drum salute
it then salutes mine."

Holy shit, it's awful!

Your professor is a fucking faggot.

"Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."

Never forget.

This is such a retarded attitude to have, professors are professors by virtue of having actually published work in their field. They are the definition of "doers". Faggot.

Professors are professors by virtue of professing something to such a degree that they have a literal degree in it.

Most of their published work is mere criticism e.g. Harold Bloom. They're too cowardly to be authentically, recklessly creative. They can only create on the basis of someone else's work.

criticism requires a certain level of creativity
>They're too cowardly to be authentically, recklessly creative.
who hurt you?

>They're too cowardly to be authentically, recklessly creative.
But this is true.

>criticism requires a certain level of creativity
I never said it didn't, I said it requires lesser creativity than in the case of e.g. the novelist who writes their own experience. Criticism requires something to be criticized, it can't exist without the thing its extolling or denigrating.
>who hurt you?
No one. Any criticism given me by my professors is laughed off as useless or sincerely considered as constructive: in neither instance does it cause me pain.

even the best athletes have coaches

This reads like gibberish, your sentences are all over the place and word choices are just strange

agree with this. most of the poem is cluttered with things that dont make any sense.the poem tries to hard to do things. it sets up metphors and abandons them, and starts new ones too late. the last four lines are fine, not excellent but besides that not very good.

this is the best criticism on this thread OP. listen to it. the words you use are too out-of-place.

>I never said it didn't,
Hmm, I wonder because it seems like you're saying that taking raw ideas and making into, say, a novel is more creative than the practise of criticism because professors deal with responding to something to produce work. I am uncertain of this position. Also, can you define "creative" as you used it here >

Isn't it a rule to always trust your editor?

>Hmm, I wonder because it seems like you're saying that taking raw ideas and making into, say, a novel is more creative than the practise of criticism because professors deal with responding to something to produce work
This is what I said. It's *more* creative to use one's own direct experience as a basis for writing than to use another person's writings on their own experience as a basis for your writing. In the latter case, you're writing on experience second-hand. I'm not saying it doesn't take creativity, I'm saying it takes less creativity: the experience has already been had, all the critic must commit to are the methods of e.g. literary criticism.
>Also, can you define "creative" as you used it here
"Creative" means "productive." A farmer growing crops possess the un-quantified quality of creativity as much as a Dante, but there are different levels of creativity (productiveness) because there are different levels of uniqueness in a person (Dante is more unique than the wheat farmer who does naught else). Like I said, it's as much creativity to be authentically creative as it is to be authentically critical. But authentic creativity takes the form of sincerity, while authentic criticism takes the form of sincere rejection or affirmation. It is a level removed (i.e. one degree of filtration through human perception) from sincerity itself, and so is not directly creative. Again, if I define myself as a literary critic, when there is no more literature to criticize, my "profession" is at an end. That's not to say someone who was formerly a critic couldn't decide to write about their own experience instead, nor is it so that one couldn't be authentically creative and authentically critical at once (there are people who write criticism as well as novels).

If you define yourself as solely a critic, you are dependent on the object of criticism.

you know what's funny and ironic about this exchange? I define myself as an incipient playwright

Well, if you define yourself as "incipient," you're not likely to get anywhere unless you change your definition, are you?

> to such a degree that they have a literal degree in it.
Professors don't have a degree in "professorship" you stupid prole. They get a PhD in their field, do postdoctoral research and then go on to get tenure.

>Professors don't have a degree in "professorship" you stupid prole.
Never said they did. I said they get a degree in the "something" (as you put it, "the field") that they deem "their profession." Learn to read.

I'm not gonna gonna claim that as a profession until I get my first pay cheque as one (or as part of a team of writers)

It's their profession because they have published work in that field thus contributing to the field you utter dunce, go smoke some weed you irrevocably dense nonperson.

I just meant that if you rigidly define yourself as fledgling, you'll probably write work that bespeaks incipience. Just be a playwright, don't wait to do what you want or dismiss it based on what other people think about it (your "monetary success").

>it's their profession because it's their profession
They can't publish work in the field unless they first believe they're a part of the field, and get a degree in it. Publishing is how they stay in the field. Keep trying though, I enjoy teaching children how to read.

The poem is not very good but the critique is not very good either. Neither of those people seem like they know what they are doing, just going by feeling without understanding what they are doing or knowing what they are looking for. This just makes me sad. :(

It absolutely boggles my mind how you see getting a degree in a field and publishing work in it is somehow something to be derided, bravo user.

Nice to see I've forced you to backpedal, if you are that other user. We were talking about what it means to be a professor, not whether it's generally "worthwhile." All I said was being a professor requires a certain amount of cowardice, which it does, and this has nothing to do with its "intellectual value."

As to that, as I've said, I only deride it inasmuch as there are critics who ascribe more value to their criticism than it possesses. I'm not saying criticism is useless: I'm criticizing you right now.

Critics can't exist without their targets, even if one's target is oneself (in the case of editing). "Getting a degree" in the sense of subjecting oneself to an educational institution just doesn't make sense to me: I enjoy writing, and I can read and write just as well without paying exorbitant fees to have a "professional" tell me why my writing is or isn't worthwhile. In fact, from my experience in college, the criticism threads on Veeky Forums are much more useful than criticism from one's professor. A professor has a tendency to judge a student's work according to their own ideology, and justify this by appealing to their own authority, whereas on Veeky Forums there is no authority to be appealed to other than the constructiveness of one's criticisms.

Of course, academia has a bit of a stranglehold on certain aspects of esoteria, but I can "steal" anything I want to read over the internet.

>n fact, from my experience in college, the criticism threads on Veeky Forums are much more useful than criticism from one's professor.
lmao

>"Getting a degree" in the sense of subjecting oneself to an educational institution just doesn't make sense to me: I enjoy writing, and I can read and write just as well without paying exorbitant fees to have a "professional" tell me why my writing is or isn't worthwhile. In fact, from my experience in college, the criticism threads on Veeky Forums are much more useful than criticism from one's professor. A professor has a tendency to judge a student's work according to their own ideology, and justify this by appealing to their own authority, whereas on Veeky Forums there is no authority to be appealed to other than the constructiveness of one's criticisms.

okay my last reply to you was here >And I was beginning to try to understand these notions of being "creative" but here you've lost it

OP, if you want to make a living writing poetry, there isn't much you can do other than teach, and those teachers, these "cowardly professors," are picked by colleges only after they have achieved success as poets. Saying "those who can't do, teach," w/r/t your creative writing professor shows how personally you are taking his criticisms.