… poetry can be edited, maybe it can even be enhanced at an initial stage, but once a poem is printed, it’s printed. What I’m wondering most about lately are the impressions an author/artist leaves on an audience and what makes an audience object to an artist’s work.

Once a is poem written down and published, it’s published–or so it seems to me. I really don’t understand what joy some people get out of rehashing an already finished product. I don’t understand this method of critique. Sure, I can change a poem to suit my own sensibility, but where would that get the poem? What does that do for an already published piece? Maybe a workshop poem could stand some treatment, but published?

Although, I suppose from any reader’s standpoint, perhaps the reader could’ve done better–they could’ve changed the poem to suit the reader. Don’t we all see ourselves as writing things better? Personally, I think that writing better entails writing poems different, and writing different poems better. It entails taking what we read, learning from what is before us, and interpreting, hopefully improving on what we read and learning from what we read, thus enhancing a product that we can place before the reader. Or not.