It's November. Saddest song ever. I had a complete stranger critique my poem.

Yeah. Everything outside is dying and getting hard.  People get presents soon. Throats swell, turn pink. Kids will stand at the ends of their driveways and huddle with heads inward, waiting for busses in the dark.

80% of my clothes are for winter. All sweaters and jackets and long-sleeved shirts. I am going to wear these when I'm in Muncie this weekend. Hopefully there will be Herot and poems and other things.

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I really don't know what the saddest song in the world is. I'd imagine the person who wrote it has no idea how sad it is. With the way things are going right now, I really don't want to think about sad songs. They'll just make my body ache and cause me to curl up under a blanket all day and not get anything done. 

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So, I haven't had anyone critique my poetry or been in a workshop setting in a while. I found this forum where people post poems for mini-workshop sessions. I figured it would be nice to get a few things out there and have some other folks work on them. The fact that they were strangers was interesting: I mean.... you can't see their faces or expression. Different.

I posted one poem and the first response I got was terrible. The person completely ribbed my poem. Called it juvenile. Said it was introverted and that "it's a random pile of jotted stuff that only makes sense to yourself, with a few interesting images and ideas sprinkled in." I was accused of a feeble attempt to 'shock' my audience because I talked about organs and used the phrase 'dog dick red' to describe somebody's lips. I also 'insulted' people because there were two typos in the draft, and the fact that I brought something into a workshop environment .

Not going to lie, it was a bit disheartening. Don't get me wrong, that's what criticism is there for. It's there to address the various elements of a piece of literature, in hopes to give the author some insight on what can be improved on. But I honestly didn't see this person say one thing positive about the poem. They were hung up about punctuation. 

The last thing the person said was, "I hope you improve." What the fuck does that even mean? It kind of ruined my day. Right now, I don't feel good about my poems, and that usually doesn't happen. It makes me think my chapbook is worthless and the people who I sent it to and the few people that actually paid for it either didn't read it or hated it and want their three dollars back.

Damn.