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Critiquing Critiques

by RJ McCaffery

here are a number of "how to critique poetry" guides floating about. Most of them are about the etiquette of how to frame a critique, which I’m not so much concerned with. To do justice to the actual process of critiquing, I’d have to write a book; there are a lot of complexities in the reading/analyzing process that we perform very quickly. Teasing them out would take up an enormous amount of space. For the purposes of this essay, I'll try to give a few abstracts about the process before moving on to a specific example.

There are several assumptions I have to operate under in order to write this.

  1. The first assumption is that the poem being considered is “in progress” and will contain some areas of malleability, a line or two (at least) which the poet is not entirely sure of.
  2. The second is that the poem is in a mode that allows for a shaping critique by a public reader. By this I mean that the poem isn’t, for example, either surrealistic or of “random” composition—in which case nothing a critiquer says could possibly be of any value to the poet.
  3. The third is that we’ll be operating in a “workshop” setting where multiple readers will be responding not only to the poem but to comments on the poem.
  4. The fourth is that the reader is “cold” and has no extra information available to him or her than the rest of the “general public” who might come across the poem in a magazine or an anthology.

Poems that fall outside any of these categories might be able to be critiqued, but we’d use different strategies to do so.

Right.

Well, the cornerstone of a good critique is a solid reading of a poem. In other words, your skill as a critiquer is predicated on your ability as a reader.

I don’t think I can overstate that.

The best way to get a close reading of a poem is to read it aloud several times and let it percolate for a bit, then read it aloud again. When you first move through the poem, don’t worry about getting things “right” or seeing any kind of “deep meaning”. Instead, just get a sense of the poem’s shape. Try not to commit to any interpretation but remember your initial reactions. Each successive reading should make the poem that much more clear to you—you’ll begin reading “deeper” and spotting those intricate patterns. Unfortunately, I can’t really tell you “how” this happens—it just does. One of those human brain things. But seriously, reading a poem aloud at least 3 times is the best way to begin to understand it.

Also, I should point out that reading aloud effectively is not a "beginning step" or something, like training wheels, you'll discard as you go. It’s something that all the best poets I’ve ever met or studied with do. Forrest Gander, Marilyn Nelson, Thomas Lux, Marie Howe, Mark Doty, Stephen Dobyns, David Rivard, C.D. Wright, Jack Gilbert, Billy Collins, Philip Hobsbaum, Alice Fulton, Liz Lockhead, Edward Morgan, Christopher Reid, etc. All of them (all of them) read new poems aloud. Granted, one or two skim the poem silently before reading aloud, but I can say that I’ve personally seen each one of them read “new” poems, and every single one of them read the poem aloud to begin. I would go so far to say that if you don’t read aloud (no matter how much esteem you’re held in by your friends) you’ll never amount to much in the muse’s eyes. If argument by authority and precedent isn’t enough, consider that the human eye is made to process light, but the medium of poetry is sound. Fortunately, we have a pair of organs to deal with that.

So let’s say that “Step One” is reading the poem very carefully. Out loud. Several times. (PS—don’t listen to any kind of music while you read aloud.)

By the end of your “careful reading” you should know the basic “facts” of the poem. For example—the number of lines, if it’s in form, if there’s a discernable meter or rhythmic quality, if there’s rhyme, assonance, consonance, repetition. You should also know the tense of the poem—whether it’s set in the past present or future. You’ll know if the poem is in first, second or third person. You’ll know how many “characters” there are in the poem (if there are any.) You should be able to guess at the basic questions of “who” the speaker is, “who” the characters are, “when” and “where” the poem takes place. In many cases you’ll know “what” the poem is about. You’ll know the basic emotional stance of the poem (angry, passive, whimsical). The list isn’t really endless, but it seems that way as I sit here and type it out.

None of this “very obvious” information should be discounted—your “deep” analysis will rest on it and it’s a good idea to articulate it before you begin, and to make mention of some it in your final written criticism. Initially, it might be useful for you to make a list of these “basic items” and set out to answer as many of them as you can before you begin to critique the poem. (I’d suggest having anyone interested in this brainstorm up the types of things you can “know” about a poem without “deep” reading.) Again, this isn’t something you “bypass” later—you’ll never just read a poem and go into some mystic swoon and “know” that line 8 really needs an image, although you may with practice internalize this process so that it seems like a snap judgement. Good critiquing is predicated on the information that you gather before you begin to make “shaping judgements” concerning the poem—in short you have to get your facts straight.

Sometimes it will be impossible (due to the poem) to come up with a solid answer some of the above. You may honestly have no idea how many characters there are in a narrative poem, and when you go in and count, you might think “Hey, there could be four people, there could be five.” But that’s good to note down also. Perhaps the poem is constructed so that there’s no real sense of time or place—it mentions a car, so it could be anytime after cars were invented, but that’s also good to make a note of.

Sometimes you’ll make obvious misreadings based on your own very human short-comings as a reader. You’ll confuse two types of birds. You’ll confuse polenta and roux. You’ll simply not get that the two “she”’s in the poem are different characters. Even so—it’s always best to come clean with what you thought the poem meant. Your misreadings might actually help the poet—and if they’re just common brainfarts (which we all have) they’ll certainly indicate which areas of your critique are suspect and shouldn’t be trusted. There is a school of thought out there that says it’s better to ironically posture and cloak the basis for your suggestions rather than revealing your reasoning (and thus risk making mistakes or looking like a fool or treading on toes). “Goodness,” some will snicker, “what idiot would confuse roux and polenta?” Unfortunately, embarrassment is something you have to risk—and usually it’s not all that embarrassing.

That pretty much should cover “Step One”. The more thoroughly you read, the easier the “actual critique” becomes.

So “Step Two” is a sort of “deeper reading” based on our ability to note patterns and inconsistency. Right away, you should have several things to say about the poem. Either the basic “what’s going on” is clear or not. Either there’s a lot of rhyme or there isn’t. So on, so forth. But here you might want to get out specific tools to examine areas of the poem. For example, if there’s a lot of rhyme at the end of the lines, it’s a good clue that the poem might be in form. Best then to actually count out the syllables of each line.

Any time I go into the poem looking for one specific element, I think of it as putting on “a lens.” Imagine a special lens that you can slide over your eyes, a lens that blocks out everything except for Verbs. With this lens on, you can peer into the poem and notice that the Verbs are “sat, exfoliated, said, said, said, burst, gurgle”. Perhaps some work is required to make them more dynamic, less repetitive (or perhaps more repetitive by design). That’ll depend on what the overall poem does.

The immediate goal of using a Lens approach is not to rush in and shape the poem to any particular aesthetic, doctrine or style. Rather, it should let you isolate discrete elements in the poem so you can better understand the poem’s structural building blocks—the boulders around which the mind of the reader flows.

That said, here are a number of lenses you might consider donning.

Verbs, nouns, pronouns, adverbs, adjectives, participles, prepositions, interjections, capitalization, punctuation, labels, jargon, concretions, abstractions, clichés, weak or passive language, gerunds, verb tense, synonyms, antonyms, rhyme, rhythm -- in short, any discrete element that you might notice is fair game.

Granted, you can’t use all of these on every poem that you critique. However you should trust your ear (and your multiple readings of the poem) and notice anything that seems out of place. For example if you notice that the punctuation seems erratic—go in and look at that. If you notice a cliché, see if there are others. Perhaps the poem is a list—look at all the list items separately, regroup them, etc.

You should also let your focus be guided (to an extent) by older, more experienced poets. For example—regardless of personal poetics, 95% of experienced poets will tell you that one of the first things a fledgling poet often does is go absolutely crazy with their modifiers. No noun is unchaperoned by an adjective. No verb can cross the street without its adverb. As a result, many beginning poets use vague nouns and verbs and rely on the adjectives and adverbs to sheepdog them into place. It is, for many reasons, a limiting and poor writing style. Thus, one of the most common “critiquing strategies” is to look for adjectives and adverbs (don the lens)— if you see a lot of them, look at the nouns and verbs. Are they vague and abstract? If so it could be a problem. Another common beginning tendency is to completely misunderstand the use of line-breaks. This gets tricky because there are several liniation strategies, but again, it’s something that should be looked at an weighed against your experience.

Lenses (I feel compelled to point out again) are just tools—there’s no quick list of changes that ought to be made based on what they show you.

So we have our Aloud Readings which should lead to at least one “Deeper Reading” where we look at something structural inside the poem to confirm a guess or a hunch as what might be going on, what kind of patterns there are.

Normally, it will take you less time to reach this stage with your average poem than it’s taken you to read this far.

The next step is a “parsing” reading, where you go “line by line” and try to figure out exactly what the poem says and what it means. You should generally operate under the assumption of the writer’s intentionality: Assume that if it's "there", the writer intended it to be there, no matter how odd or difficult it is, no matter how awkward it is to reconcile with the "other" parts of a poem.

Read the entire poem—do not "discard" any part of the poem when you are analyzing. Often the "difficult" areas in the poem, where an "it" serves as a placeholder, or a character is suddenly introduced will be the fulcrum areas which determines what’s really important in a poem. Go with what the poem actually says, not what you’d like it to say, or what you suspected the poet “must have meant” (although you can note that). A case in point—earlier this year I wrote in a long response to a poem which I thought contained, well, let’s call it a dubious moral tone. My evidence for that was slim—namely, it was connotative and rested on one rather ambiguous passage that everyone was ignoring (so that their readings would go more smoothly). I was lambasted for this here (and on other boards). But when the poet wrote in, he acknowledged I was correct in my reading and that moral issue was a very important element of the poem for him.

In very clear poems, this parsing reading will go swiftly—yet you still might notice something that your “reading mind” compensated for. For example, a misplaced modifier that you simply “corrected” as you read. That’s something the poet ought to know about.

In a way the “parsing” reading and the “deep” readings are kind of intertwined. One will lead to another. For example, you could begin a “clear” poem by looking at the verbs (which seemed odd) and realize that the tense changes. This could prompt you pay attention to that during your line by line. Or you could do a line by line and realize that the verb tense changed—you could then get out the verb lens and look at all the verbs in the poem to see if there was a reason for that. Any of these could prompt a new “basic” reading where your whole understanding of the poem shifts.

The final step is actually “shaping” poem with a critique, and for that you have to bob back up to that kind of General Reading, the “basic understanding” of what the poem is doing that will guide our shaping. More on that in the examples though.

I was lucky enough to have two writers volunteer their poems in progress for this essay. The first, “Sirens on Good Friday” is written by Charles Cornner. The second, “What the Rocks Say” is written by Paul Dickey and will be appearing in Artemis.

Let’s begin with Sirens on Good Friday.

Sirens on Good Friday 


Sirens train voices in pitches where phonation 
is delicate; where vowels become a primal schwa, 
where orgasm sounds like injury and the laughter of the saved 
selling doves and pigeons at the temple gate, because grace 
is only as free as it costs to present it in living 
Gospel color to poor unchurched mice scurrying 
through darkness, stealing kisses from cheese. 

The poor will always be a cottage industry, 
Judas heard as the dollar whore kneeling 
adorned Christ’s feet with perfume his blowjobs 
had paid for, and promptly offered the temple 
its unctioned sacrifice, the high priests grateful 
as government. Out to the mountain where nails 
pound and earthquakes tear curtains in two 
like phantom scissors, and the choir sings 

“Were You There,” humming the last verse 
like Hebrews missing Egypt, unknowing forty years 
would pass in wandering and rebellion before reaching 
the Promised Land without their director, 
who used his baton to strike the rock 
instead of executing a delicate downbeat 
as he was taught in Conducting 101. 
The choir rallied to his cue and boisterously 
moaned deliverance like Easter Sunday.

The first oral/aural read tells us many things about the poem; namely, that it will take a few more reads to fully grasp the matter at hand. I made a note of the few things that struck me on the first read; I found the beginning difficult with the first run on sentence. I was thrown by some of the line breaks. There were a lot of religious references, but at the moment, I’m unsure of the “theme” or “subject” of the poem. That’s really all that’s required of a first read.

So I read it again (aloud).

It helps—I’m picking up more. There’s a musical/choir set of images at work here, playing back and forth across the religious references (which are old and new testament). There are also several sexual/monetary images/lines at work. I have a “basic feel” of the poem now and have compensated for the linebreaks which earlier threw me by “expecting” the enjambment as I read.

I can pretty much do my “checklist” of what I know (again, I’m not really “digging into” the poem yet, I’m just rolling it around.)

I can go in now and look at a few “quick check” points before I do a more careful reading. Please note that none of these is “connected” to the content of the poem.

The poem is actually 24 lines long (good guess).

The stanzas are irregular.

A quick syllable count of some random lines shows that they vary.

The average line length seems to be around 12 syllables or so.

The poem does not scan as accentual syllabic verse.

There is no end rhyme scheme

I already know a lot about the poem and I haven’t really “thought” about what I was reading. (Actually, I have thought about it by the time I sit down to type all this, but I want to take this in easy and separate steps. )

I also know a lot of negative information about the poem—I know it’s not a love poem. I know it’s not a rant. I know it’s not haiku. I know the tone isn’t breezy. I know the tone isn’t bitter and angry, etc.

I’ll read it again—but this time I go in easy chunks and stop to think about the poem as I go. An easy chunk could be a sentence, a line, a stanza—it really depends how dense the poem is. What I’d like to do is come to a kind of ‘paraphraseable” understanding of each “chunk” the poem before I continue deeper into it.

To begin, the title of the poem is Sirens on Good Friday. Often the title of the poem will announce the “theme” or “subject” of the poem, especially if there’s some kind of ambiguity in the opening lines. Considering the title in isolation, we know a few things about the poem. “Sirens” will probably be the theme or subject—sirens can mean “any singer” or they can also mean the creatures that tempted Odysseus on his journey. Greek mythology 101—O has the crew stuff wax in their ears and row on by while he, strapped to the mast, listens. “Good Friday” tells us something about the situation of the sirens. It sets them in a Christian context. Good Friday is the Friday before Easter, i.e. the anniversary of the crucifixion of Christ. So the poem may very well be about the Sirens on either the day Christ was crucified or on the anniversary of that day.

This is a good place to raise a few issues.

There’s a question as to “how much” any given reader will know when faced with the elements which make up any given poem. Obviously, someone completely unfamiliar with Greek myth and/or Christian dogma would have a hard time with either of those elements. There are probably nuances of the two which escape me, despite having both drummed into my head for the majority of my life. I think as a general reader we have to hold ourselves to a reasonable standard of “I’ll go look it up”. As a critic, I have to have a much higher standard—if I don’t have some idea of what an element “means” (either through abstract knowledge or the poem’s context) then I really should go make a reasonable effort to educate myself before I write about the poem.

There’s also the issue of “liking” the poem. Some people will be “turned off” by either the mythological or religious references. Others might not have even made it this far, thinking “My goodness, the poem isn’t in a recognizable form—so I’ll shoot it down”. Sounds wacky, yeah, but we see it all the time. We can let those preferences of ours into the critique, but right now, before we’ve formed a clear picture of it, they really have no place. If we allow ourselves to be guided by them, our understanding of what the poem is (as far as we can know such a thing) and what the poem is trying to accomplish (as far as we can know such a thing) will be severely skewed. We’ll be wasting our time, and the poet’s time, by writing propaganda. When we read “tightly” we also have to read somewhat “coldly”.

So—back to our “tight” read though of the poem.

Sirens train voices in pitches where phonation 
is delicate; where vowels become a primal schwa, 
where orgasm sounds like injury and the laughter of the saved 
selling doves and pigeons at the temple gate, because grace 
is only as free as it costs to present it in living 
Gospel color to poor unchurched mice scurrying 
through darkness, stealing kisses from cheese.

OK—the first stanza is a sentence. It will take a bit to parse.

Right away we see the first word, the subject of the sentence is “Sirens”— so as a general operating principle, I’m going to assume that “Sirens” are the subject of the poem. It may sound kind of foolish, but it’s often good to simply repeat/restate what’s there out loud in a kind of “prose” way to help us understand the poem. In this case, “Sirens” (subject) “train” (verb) “voices” (in pitches where phonation is delicate.) The rest modifies how/why this is done.

Let’s “look” at it this way:

Sirens train voices 
in pitches where phonation is delicate; 
where vowels become a primal schwa, 
where orgasm sounds like injury and the laughter 
	of the saved selling doves and pigeons at the temple gate, 
because grace is only as free as it costs to present 
	it in living Gospel color 
to poor unchurched mice scurrying through darkness, 
	stealing kisses from cheese.

Where we’d reliniate it to order the major clauses on the page.

Now we have to stick with the poem and attempt to understand all of it—not just parts convenient to some kind of pre-conceived argument we’d like to import. The “top” or “primary” level of the poem tells us a lot about “pitches where phonation is delicate”. Namely, in these pitches vowels become a primal schwa (look it up), orgasm sounds like injury and (also) orgasm sounds like the laughter of the saved selling doves and pigeons at the temple gate. The word “because” signals an explanation of all this, which is that grace is only as free as it costs to present grace (via the gospel) to mice. The mice are “unchurched” (a pun on “churchmouse) and scurry through the darkness. They also steal kisses from cheese.

The temptation at this point is to launch “deeper” into the poem and begin trying to figure out what it means. Instead, let’s just be satisfied that we understand what the poem “actually says” and press on.

The poor will always be a cottage industry, 
Judas heard as the dollar whore kneeling 
adorned Christ’s feet with perfume his blowjobs 
had paid for, and promptly offered the temple 
its unctioned sacrifice, the high priests grateful 
as government.

The italics indicate a quote or “spoken phrase” of some kind. In this case it’s something that Judas hears. (Although the poem rushes forward, we don’t have to. Right now we have “Sirens” as a kind of subject/character. Here, “Judas” is introduced.) Judas hears this phrase “as” (which is troubling) the dollar whore adorned Christ’s feet “with the perfume his blowjobs had paid for”. So we have more characters—Christ and the male “dollar whore.” The “as” is troubling since it can mean either “like” (I am as fat as a cow) or “while” (I sang as Judith listened.) So either Judas is hearing “like/as though” he were a dollar whore, or Judas is hearing when the dollar whore adorned Christ’s feet.

A quick word on restricted/unrestricted clauses. If there’s a comma (pair) setting off the clause, it does not immediately refer to the item preceding it. If there’s no comma, it refers to whatever directly proceeds it. In this case, the poem “actually says”:

The dollar whore (who is kneeling) adorned Christ’s feet with the perfume Christ’s blowjobs had paid for.

Although most readers will assume that the pairing that makes the most sense is “the dollar whore’s blowjobs had paid for”. So it’s kind of a tricky issue. Right now, (I’m kind of cheating by saying this) I’ll assume, given the rest of the poem that it’s “the dollar whore’s blowjobs” and will point this out to the poet. But my operant reading will go on “best guess” (as all readings do) and assume “dollar whore”. This is a place in the poem where you have to balance what’s said v. what you think the poet meant to say. It’s also a very dangerous place for the critic—taking the wrong fork in the road can mess up the rest of your reading. Similarly, I’ll be assuming that “Judas”:

promptly offered the temple 
its unctioned sacrifice, the high priests grateful 
as government.

It’s this kind of juncture in the poem that exposes the fallacy of “separating” the different stages of realization and reading (which I’m trying to do.) Our understanding flows back and forth in our readings—sometimes we read “ahead” and get a metaphor right away, other times we read “behind” and fail to pick up on a perfectly clear and obviously made sentence which changes our entire understanding of the poem’s narrative (and hence the impact of that immediately grasped metaphor.) So—anyway, Judas offers the temple it’s unctioned sacrifice, and the high priests are “grateful as government.”

Pressing on without dwelling on “the meaning” of the above:

Out to the mountain where nails 
pound and earthquakes tear curtains in two 
like phantom scissors, and the choir sings 
“Were You There,” humming the last verse 
like Hebrews missing Egypt, unknowing forty years 
would pass in wandering and rebellion before reaching 
the Promised Land without their director, 
who used his baton to strike the rock 
instead of executing a delicate downbeat 
as he was taught in Conducting 101.

Another long sentence. Let’s rebreak it (just to “see” it in terms of major clauses).

Out to the mountain 
where nails pound and earthquakes tear 
	curtains in two like phantom scissors, 
and the choir sings “Were You There,” 
humming the last verse like Hebrews missing Egypt, 
unknowing forty years would pass in wandering and 
	rebellion before reaching the Promised Land without their director, 
who used his baton to strike the rock 
instead of executing a delicate downbeat 
as he was taught in Conducting 101.

OK—it’s a sentence fragment. There’s no noun or verb. Usually, fragments operate in poetry like the do in speech; we “cast back” to the general thread of the conversation to try to pick up on what the subject is. In this case, we started with those Sirens and then moved to Judas, the mysterious “speaker” of the poor/cottage industry line, Christ and the male prostitute.

At this point, quite honestly, I’m lost. Do one of the characters “go” out to the mountain? Is this meant to be a sudden shift in scene?

Nothing to do but make the best of it. The pounding nails and earthquakes seem to be new pieces of information, like the mountain. The choir has some “linkage” with the idea of “Sirens”. The Hebrews introduce old testament imagery, and are tied back to the choir with their director (Moses) likened to a musical director (baton/downbeat/Conducting 101). So, although we can’t really tie this into a narrative, we can note very obvious parallels and similarities.

The poem closes with:

The choir rallied to his cue and boisterously 
moaned deliverance like Easter Sunday.

So we have the choir (again) and can therefore assume that “his cue” refers to “the director”. Although that’s kind of interesting since “the director” isn’t really introduced in the same “space” as the choir in the previous lines. If we read them again, we’ll see that the director is part of a long modifier that tells us how the choir hums the last verse of “Were You There”. Here the choir moans deliverance like Easter Sunday.

Even with all the asides, I hope our process of “mostly staying on the surface” while we just “read” the poem is clear enough. We should only really be trying to understand or “parse” the poem to see if it holds together on this level. Sometimes the poem will be crystal clear after this kind of reading. All the “deeper” stuff will work to reinforce the upper levels while adding nuance and meaning, suggesting parallel and harmonious ideas.

In this case, as a reader I’m pretty much lost on the surface level of this one. Basically, to reduce the poem, we begin with the Sirens, move to Judas, have the unconnected “out to the mountain” sentence, then close with the image of a choir. For this kind of poem (a good one to pick really) we have to go further in and try to see how the “poetic elements link up if we’re to have any hope of understanding this.

Now it’s time to brainstorm/make connections. This is the part you really can’t teach anyone.

Balancing all the elements in my mind, I’ll try to connect the musical images and the religious images, which seem to be the strongest. Since the poem’s title is “Sirens on Good Friday”, I’ll give the musical images a primary place. Hmm. Could be a number of things. Perhaps the Sirens and the Choir are the same. There’s no other references to Greek Myth, so I’ll go with the idea that they are, in fact the same and the poem is about this choir singing. Perhaps the separate sections are meant to describe what their performance (singing) is like? No—I can’t really reconcile the “middle” sections of the poem with that. In any event, describing a human choir’s voices like this seems a bit over the top. Although “orgasm” might be used a musical term, it’s not really something you see choirs doing all that often. Hmm. I’ll take a step back and think of what I know about choirs, about what choirs seem “like” based on all my own experiences and the stories I’ve been told. Hmm. I still can’t quite make the poem read that way, even though the poem ends with a sentence telling us there is a choir. So, back to the beginning. Perhaps there’s connections to follow regarding Greek Myth, Sirens = some kind of temptation? I read the poem again and see none. I read it again for the religious references—basically there’s Judas/Christ/Whore dynamic, and the Hebrews in the desert. There are also the Gospel references and the close on Easter (the Sirens sing on Good Friday). Since the “out to the mountain” section contains a bit on a specific song—perhaps I’d need to know that song to make more sense of the poem? Am I missing something? I read the poem again. It’s still resisting me. Hmm.

Sirens on Good Friday 

Sirens train voices in pitches where phonation 
is delicate; where vowels become a primal schwa, 
where orgasm sounds like injury and the laughter of the saved 
selling doves and pigeons at the temple gate, because grace 
is only as free as it costs to present it in living 
Gospel color to poor unchurched mice scurrying 
through darkness, stealing kisses from cheese. 

The poor will always be a cottage industry, 
Judas heard as the dollar whore kneeling 
adorned Christ’s feet with perfume his blowjobs 
had paid for, and promptly offered the temple 
its unctioned sacrifice, the high priests grateful 
as government. Out to the mountain where nails 
pound and earthquakes tear curtains in two 
like phantom scissors, and the choir sings 

“Were You There,” humming the last verse 
like Hebrews missing Egypt, unknowing forty years 
would pass in wandering and rebellion before reaching 
the Promised Land without their director, 
who used his baton to strike the rock 
instead of executing a delicate downbeat 
as he was taught in Conducting 101. 
The choir rallied to his cue and boisterously 
moaned deliverance like Easter Sunday.

OK—I’m just not going to get it. At this point I feel comfortable assigning that fault to the poem.

My best reading after brainstorming? I have to work the poem “backwards” but,

The poem is about a choir, directed by a conductor, singing. They are singing on Good Friday. They sing “Were You There”, perhaps among other music. Their singing is like a number of religious things, climaxing in “Easter Sunday.” Specifically, they hum “Were You There” in a way that reminds the speaker of the wandering Hebrews “missing Egypt. I suspect the choir are “sirens” and that they’re also “training” their voices—so perhaps this is a choir practice. The pitches they sing/practice in are like a number of things.

That’s really all I’ve “got” though. Much of it did not click in my brain till I actually sat down and wrote out “what I knew”.

So—what did I use from the poem to get this, and what’s left over?

Sirens on Good Friday 

Sirens train voices in pitches where phonation 
is delicate; where vowels become a primal schwa, 
where orgasm sounds like injury and the laughter of the saved 
selling doves and pigeons at the temple gate, because grace 
is only as free as it costs to present it in living 
Gospel color to poor unchurched mice scurrying 
through darkness, stealing kisses from cheese. 

The poor will always be a cottage industry, 
Judas heard as the dollar whore kneeling 
adorned Christ’s feet with perfume his blowjobs 
had paid for, and promptly offered the temple 
its unctioned sacrifice, the high priests grateful 
as government. Out to the mountain where nails 
pound and earthquakes tear curtains in two 
like phantom scissors, and the choir sings 

“Were You There,” humming the last verse 
like Hebrews missing Egypt, unknowing forty years 
would pass in wandering and rebellion before reaching 
the Promised Land without their director, 
who used his baton to strike the rock 
instead of executing a delicate downbeat 
as he was taught in Conducting 101. 
The choir rallied to his cue and boisterously 
moaned deliverance like Easter Sunday.

So you can see that my best reading uses only part of the poem—that I really can’t align the whole thing.

Some of you may have noticed that an honest reading pretty much amounts to a critique. If I did have a clear reading which “saw” the majority of the poem in a clear sense, I could go through and look at the weak areas and offer shaping suggestions based on my sense of “what the poem was trying to do”. Here, since I’m not getting such a large chunk of the poem, it would be disingenuous of me to write in and say “Hey, you ought to drop that middle stuff altogether.” Perhaps it’s the middle stuff that “matters”. I also shouldn’t just pretend it isn’t there. So the only thing I can really do is point out that I couldn’t make the poem work for me—that there were large tracts of this that didn’t mesh.

However, I can also go though and point out both structural and stylistic things which might prove helpful. (Look back up at the lens list) I can note those line breaks that made me stumble. I can note that I didn’t see any reason for the second stanza break. The first occurs at a clear sift of space and time—a move to a new thought. The second breaks a sentence. I can put on my “modifer” lens and see if the poem has excessive modifiers (I’d try this because, basically, the poem didn’t make much sense to me. Perhaps the poet is new to writing; over modification is a common beginner’s foible). In this case, I find:

Sirens on Good Friday 

Sirens train voices in pitches where phonation 
is delicate; where vowels become a primal schwa, 
where orgasm sounds like injury and the laughter of the saved 
selling doves and pigeons at the temple gate, because grace 
is only as free as it costs to present it in living 
Gospel color to poor unchurched 
mice scurrying 
through darkness, stealing kisses from cheese. 

The poor will always be a cottage industry, 
Judas heard as the dollar whore kneeling 
adorned Christ’s feet with perfume his blowjobs 
had paid for, and promptly offered the temple 
its unctioned sacrifice, the high priests grateful 
as government. Out to the mountain where nails 
pound and earthquakes tear curtains in two 
like phantom scissors, and the choir sings 

“Were You There,” humming the last verse 
like Hebrews missing Egypt, unknowing forty years 
would pass in wandering and rebellion before reaching 
the Promised Land without their director, 
who used his baton to strike the rock 
instead of executing a delicate downbeat 
as he was taught in Conducting 101. 
The choir rallied to his cue and boisterously 
moaned deliverance like Easter Sunday.

Not really all that bad. In the final crit, I probably wouldn’t mention them, unless one was particularly unnecessary and would make a good illustration. The reason I wouldn’t mention them is that the poem really, to my mind, isn’t at that “polishing” stage where a word change or two will address any of my main reservations.

Thinking back on it, there were a number of long sentences—which means a number of clauses. I can scan the poem quickly to see what kinds of verbs the poem uses (verbs in the broadest sense of “action words”)— I bet I’ll find a lot of “ings”, which I’d noticed earlier. I’ll put in some line breaks to better “see” this element

Sirens on Good Friday 

Sirens train voices 
in pitches where phonation is delicate; 
where vowels become a primal schwa, 
where orgasm sounds like injury and the laughter of the saved 
selling doves and pigeons at the temple gate, 
because grace is only as free as it costs to present
 it in living Gospel color 
to poor unchurched mice scurrying through darkness, 
stealing kisses from cheese. 

The poor will always be a cottage industry, 
Judas heard 
as the dollar whore kneeling adorned Christ’s feet 
with perfume his blowjobs had paid for, 
and promptly offered the temple its unctioned sacrifice, 
the high priests grateful as government. 

Out to the mountain where nails pound and 
earthquakes tear curtains in two like phantom scissors, 
and the choir sings “Were You There,” 
humming the last verse 
like Hebrews missing Egypt, 
unknowing forty years would pass in 
wandering 
and rebellion before reaching the Promised Land 
without their director, 
who used his baton to strike the rock 
instead of executing a delicate downbeat 
as he was taught in Conducting 101. 
The choir rallied to his cue and 
boisterously moaned deliverance like Easter Sunday.

That’s a lot of “ings”— on a strictly technical/aesthetic level, I’ve always found a preponderance of “ing” sounds to make a poem sound “chimey.” Then again, I also find most sibilance (many “s” sounds) to be similarly off-putting. Both are fairly commonly held tastes. So I’d probably mention that. Also, I’d point out the great number of weak/passive verbs and suggest that if the poem really were trying to characterize a choir, I’d probably use more insistent language—something that said strongly “This is how it’s like”.

And that’s pretty much that.

When I sit down to write the critique, I wouldn’t have typed all this information out, although I would have said much of it aloud—certainly the poem many times, also my “prose summary” and some of the “paraphrase/restatement”. What I’d actually end up typing would depend on the poem. In this case, I’d probably point out my basic difficulty in understanding the poem. Then I’d offer a ‘best guess’ (so the poet would know what I actually came up with). I’d probably also point out the verb/passive language issue. I’d stay silent on the modifiers, the “sirens/greek myth” red herring, and other odds and ends which didn’t even make it into this “recap” of the process.

I would like to say that if you’re looking to expand your critiquing and writing skills that you must: read the poem aloud go “line by line”, examining everything

It’s also very helpful to the poet if you let them in on your reading process so they understand what readings/assumptions on your part ended up guiding your critique and suggestions.

I’ll add a few “don’ts” at the very end.

The second poem is “What the Rocks Say” by Paul Dickey.

What the Rocks Say 

Air and water forget what the rocks 
remember: how a ball of fire, 
the size of San Francisco, rained on 
our town like millions of nuclear bombs, 

how God played, sixty million years 
before he had to remember to be God, 
how the most successful species of all time 
still lives in our home, how dinosaurs 

earned their name, how mammals 
became themselves, how you and I 
tonight and for a measly sixty years 
scratch a surface that leaves a mark.

On the first read (Aloud!), I get that the poem is largely centered on a meteor and the speaker’s imagination of it. I also notice it closes on a “you and I, tonight”— as strong a clue as you’re going to get that this is a kind of love poem, or a personal lyric. It’s very clear on the first read.

So I read it again (aloud).

The poem seems to be ordered in two ways, temporally, where we have a movement forward through time, beginning in the past and ending in the “now” and a series of phrases that begin with “how”. On the second read, I’m pretty much sailing.

My “checklist” of what I know:

My “quick check” points (where I look for specific structural items) show:

So, for the ‘line by line” read for understanding, I’ll cut up the poem into it’s major rhetorical/syntactic units:

What the Rocks Say

The subject of the poem is probably going to be “what the rocks say” meaning that it will be either in voice or information “given” by the rocks.

Air and water forget what the rocks remember:

On the level of sense—air and water forget what rocks remember. It’s personification. I assume that the rocks don’t actually remember, but that they contain a kind of record that air and water don’t hold. Basic geology. In this case (prompted by the colon) we’re told rocks remember a long list of stuff. I note that the title and the first line are doing pretty much the same thing in terms of rhetoric (at least, as far as I can tell at this stage)

how a ball of fire, the size of San Francisco, 
rained on our town like millions of nuclear bombs,

First list item, a ball of fire the size of San Francisco, hit/fell/rained down on “our town” like millions of nuclear bombs. Probably some kind of meteor, given the geological reference above. Pretty straight forward. “Our town” forshadows the you and I, and sets up the speaker as contemporary.

how God played, sixty million years 
before he had to remember to be God,

Second list item introduces “God”. It is a list item, so even now I’m wondering how this works. The rocks

remember how God played before he had to remember to be god.

how the most successful species of all time still lives in our home,

Roaches, or some kind of bug I’d guess. But we’re drifting further from the rocks (the rocks remember how the most successful species of all time still lives in our home? How do rocks remember this?)

how dinosaurs earned their name,

Pretty straight forward.

how mammals became themselves,

Evolution. This I can understand the rocks remembering.

how you and I tonight and for a measly sixty years scratch a surface that leaves a mark.

Again, trouble with the rocks actually remembering this. The you and I have (separately? together?) “scratch” a surface that leaves a mark.

So—again, very straight forward on the surface level. The organization of the poem is clear. It’s a lyric from the “I” to the “you”.

There’s nothing here I have to wrestle to understand, even though some of the phrasing is “removed” from the most direct way of saying things. Most of that removed phrasing will probably have a reason.

So, I’ll look at the poem without the framing device of “the rocks remember” since that caused some trouble on the literal level.

a ball of fire, the size of San Francisco, rained on our town like millions of nuclear bombs, God played, sixty million years before he had to remember to be God, the most successful species of all time still lives in our home, dinosaurs earned their name, mammals became themselves, you and I tonight and for a measly sixty years scratch a surface that leaves a mark.

The parallels/progressions are that much more obvious. This kind of view really doesn’t help me all that much, but it was worth trying to see what was there. What I see agrees with my readings to this point.

At this juncture, I’d feel comfortable in going in and trying to “shape” the poem to make sure that the best words were used. To do that, I again have to “go literal” and ask questions of each word. Is it the best word for what is being described? My overarching concern in my “easy” read was how rock actually remembers some of the items.

how a ball of fire, the size of San Francisco, 
rained on our town like millions of nuclear bombs,

Hmm. “a ball of fire”. Would the ball of fire actually fall? Would it burst upward from the point of impact? I’d imagine a rock the size of San Francisco would be a major, major meteor, over a mile long. That would put it into only a few meteor strikes. Why San Francisco? Are they in CA? Was there a major meteor strike in CA? (I could look up that info, but it does not really matter (at least to me) “where” the town is.) “rained” seems, well, like the wrong word for a hunk of rock slamming into the planet, even if nuclear bombs can be said to “rain”. This is one of those “primary/secondary” dilemmas, where the simile/image works on one level but also undercuts itself- perhaps a new simile might be in order. I’d probably suggest that in my written critique. This one is OK on the rocks remember issue.

how God played, sixty million years 
before he had to remember to be God,

“God played” Hmm. I don’t see this as a “rocks remember issue”. I can infer that the speaker does, and is a theist, which is neither here nor there in the poem. I don’t understand “before he had to remember to be God” at all though. I’d assume this points to some “present day” occurrence. Brainstorming—either Christ as God incarnate, Yahweh revealing himself to Abraham, something like that? But that’s relegation. The poem supposes God pre-exists humanity. . .It sounds nice but I’d recommend making it clearer. I don’t (as a reader) mind theology in poems, but it has to make sense. Too often “God” is just lobbed in there in a kind of gratuitous way.

how the most successful species of all time still lives in our home, Roaches. This again, is hard for the “rocks to remember”. It’s an interesting factoid, but I’m not sure how it works with the God issue. Presumably, if one believes in a creationist God via any of the revealed religions than the most successful species is Man. Again, it’s not that “God” is in the poem (or that roaches are in the poem) but that the poet isn’t presenting a well-thought out universe. This kind of bump, so soon into the poem, makes me wonder how much of this is rhetorical window-dressing to get us to the close. 
how dinosaurs earned their name,

Pretty straight forward. But how do the rocks remember this? I was suspicious of this on the first read, but now I realize that perhaps the record of the terrible lizards were preserved in the rock—and they were actually “named” later (meaning they earned their names when alive.) So, that makes sense then on the “rock” level.

how mammals became themselves,

Evolution. This I can understand the rocks remembering. Again though, it goes back to God—not that God and evolution are incompatible. So now I think that the God of the poem has to be a God that might have no particular love of humanity (if roaches are the most successful species).

how you and I tonight and for a measly sixty years 
scratch a surface that leaves a mark.

Again, trouble with the rocks actually remembering this. I’m getting that “window dressing” feel that the poem sloppily leads us up to this big lyric moment where we all break out the hankies. But I’m just suspicious that way. So—the You and the I “scratch” a surface that leaves a mark. They do this tonight and they’ve done this for a “measly” sixty years. Presuming this requires conscious thought, they’re both in their mid-sixties. “scratching the surface” could mean scratching the surface of the earth, i.e. farming. or perhaps just living. It’s a bit abstract, but unlike “how mammals became themselves” standing in for “evolution”, there does not seem to be a clear thing to reduce “scratch a surface” to. “leaving a mark” is a well know phrase. But how does this relate to what the rocks remember? If it’s life, then the phrase is metaphorical and does not match up well (for “leaving one’s mark in life” isn’t like the fossil record), but if it’s literal (farming/foundation laying) then the poem is a bit silly. What to make of “measly”— is it ironic? Jealous?

I find that I like the poem less and less the closer I read it. It has the virtue of being clear, but the connections aren’t well thought out.

The main charm of the poem comes from “the basic idea” that an older person is talking to a life partner and setting their lives in the context of the geological history of the planet. On its face, an interesting idea for a poem. (But as Mallarme pointed out, poems are made with words, not ideas). On the word level, there are a number of nits to be corrected/polished. Ideally the poem should hold together at the level of the word.

So for a critique, I’d probably point out that I “got” the basic idea and that the poem was clear enough on that level, and I’d explain what I thought that was. Then I’d point out that a number of points don’t make complete sense, given the poem’s basic conceit (that the rocks remember all this stuff.) I’d probably suggest the two logical options, either rework the conceit the poem hangs on, or rework the incidents so that they all “fit” in the conceit and don’t cause trouble with each other. I might delete a few to see what that did, and if it worked, I might suggest that. I’d also suggest the close be a bit more brought out to the reader. Oh- almost forgot, I’d ask why the poem was in quatrains. There’s no structural reason for it to be in quatrains.

That’s pretty much that.

What not to do: there are a few things you shouldn’t do in an “ideal” critique. Granted, we’ll all do some of them now and then, which is perfectly normal. But it’s also possible to construct bullshit critiques by using this list.

A bullshit critique of What the Rocks Say: 

Air and water forget what the rocks 
remember: how a ball of fire, 
the size of San Francisco, rained on 
our town like millions of nuclear bombs, 

how God played, sixty million years 
before he had to remember to be God, 
how the most successful species of all time 
still lives in our home, how dinosaurs 

earned their name, how mammals 
became themselves, how you and I 
tonight and for a measly sixty years 
scratch a surface that leaves a mark.

Paul -

This is lovely, so tender. Size of San Francisco rocks -really made me see it, and the poem really began for me there. I never really like the word “successful” in poems though—it feels so business like. I saw a special on the Discovery Channel last night about different kinds of fossils, so I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing lately. Also, I’ve often thought about how long roaches have been around for. Pesky little suckers. I also like the way the poem closes, on just the right tone. Check out my poem about dinosaurs on the board.

Blowing smoke up your ass,

Joe.

To sum up, solid critiquing relies on a good understanding of the poem, which relies on reading the poem aloud several times. Examine all parts of the poem and consider alternatives or options for every part. A good critique takes awhile to work on and certain poems will be so poorly made they cannot be productively critiqued except to point out a few rudimentary writing lessons their author might want to consider. As with any skill, your speed at critiquing will improve the more you do it; you’ll find yourself understanding the structures of poems faster, seeing strengths and flaws more clearly. As you improve your ability to critique, you’ll see the results in your own writing.

with thanks to Charles Cornner and Paul Dickey

© RJ McCaffery