Children should be taught how to write from, say, first grade through junior high school. After that, teaching should focus solely on how to read.

Poetry is for dilettantes and amateurs, sorry. Others need not apply.

Josh stands up for weak poems against all comers.

As a perpetrator/survivor of the bruising listserve wars (Buffalo, Buffalo!) I can agree that online "critique" could get very warped. It probably shares the nervous testo-frenzy of internet behavior in general.

I also think that "micro" criticism could easily get very glib & superficial. Sometimes it takes many many readings (& side-research) to appreciate a poem.

Nevertheless, I think Josh is over-reacting. For one thing, it seems to me that Jeff Bahr is exaggerating the method in order to show how it works. But more importantly, I think this kind of analysis - hopefully offered in a sympathetic & generous manner - is very useful & necessary, if it comes from someone who knows what they're talking about.

How much bad writing gets high marks from supposed mentors - for certain strategic reasons, reasons which benefit the mentor, rather than the poet? (ie. trotting through a large percentage of mediocre & bad poems actually pays the bills for MFA teachers. & you don't want to make the students feel too bad; you don't want them to lose hope for their future niche in the industry, or even drop out of the program...)

But I don't want to turn this into a slam of CW teachers, not at all. As I say - if they know what they're doing, they're actually doing a service to literature.

"Poetry should be written fairly well." - Wm. Shakespeare

...but a much more important factor influencing the state of criticism : the rise of the MFA program.

Just a thought in response to Gabriel ("Conchology") Gudding's long essay "From Petit to Langpo", which appears on his blog (& in an earlier version? in Flashpoint magazine).

The essay shows how democratic pedagogical principles like "everybody can write" could lead to "everybody has an inner poet waiting to get out" and "poetry is the lyrical record of personal experiences". With such truisms you can see how opposition might grow, from modernists ("poetry is the extinction of personality", "make it new", "a poem is a machine made of words") to New Critics ("a poem is an autotelic self-enclosed object"). One can see how the wave could swing back from New Critical rules to the ragged edges of biography & personality (the Confessionals, the Beats). Or how the NY School might opt out stylishly (while borrowing) from both.

It's ironic that Creative Writing schools would focus on the "craft" of empowering, squeezing out & purveying personal experience, rather than on the art of poetry itself. But I suspect Gabriel's history is a little one-sided : you could probably find offhand quotes from his same set of late 20th-cent. poets on the pedagogy of poetry, which emphasize (instead) the impersonal "craft" aspects. (I'm just guessing, though, not making a case here.)

The issue of solipsism or individualism in art cuts deeper than pedagogy & the professionalization of poetry. As I've been saying in various places on this blog, the nature, the ontological status, of the human person is a deepening mystery; how that mystery gets radiated through the modes of story & poetics creates what we call genres. (hey, who do I think I am, Northrop Frye?)

Rawther cogent critique by someone named David Alpaugh in the current issue of Poets & Writers, titled "The Professionalization of Poetry". Reviews historical development of Creative Writing programs; comes down hard on the negative aspects of graduating 2000 poets annually in U.S. Compares pressures to get along & conform created by professionalization, to the individuality of approach, creative freedom, and worldly experience of exemplary Modernists (before MFA era). Questions the standards of academic departments that substitute creative work for more thorough & demanding education in languages & literary history.

"There are two kinds of literature: official and unofficial. The first is trash; the second, stolen air." - Osip Mandelstam

I know there's a gray area, but I'm gray enough as it is, being 240 years old.