Stewart Mintzer

Critique at the Poetry Workshop

Stewart Mintzer

The Phd candidate from New York says he hates list poems but mine is tolerable.

He says that clearly the poem is about relationship and beneath its weak current there’s a darkness and the clumsy tenderness of the speaker is juxtaposed with an obsession having to do with experience and not with knowledge.

I sink lower in my chair head fuzzying as he goes on to say that the reference to balding shows the inquiring poetry postulates remain intact but paradoxically make the piece a utopian undertaking that riddles itself with its own complaints.

Some of the others nod and the Tibetan Buddhist from Boulder who’s been sitting with her eyes shut, hands on her heart, whispers that despite the pedestrian nature of the poem the words trousers and ketchup remind her of a tanka and ripple like pebbles dropped a thousand feet in a glacial lake.

The therapist from Seattle pats her hair, mumbles something about Maslow’s hierarchy and says she likes the temporal dynamic and the reference to the elevator that was somewhat sexual but with a touch of anger that sparks the shift into the hint of an authoritative adulthood.

The Phd Candidate snorts that the part about the Italian waiter was a reference to Janus, the God of doorways, and that the word spaghetti created space by dictional tension.

Finally the instructor steps in and says the poem is like a child learning about the Great War. It communicates an enormous amount of pain in a dissonant way. While it does have a small heart the words are not right-brained and convey a certain amount of suspicion through a series of formal devices that give doubt about the adequacy of its own material. He calls the second stanza psychic gloss and wants to know how I justify its existence with the panty hose reference.

[This poem was first published by the Portland Review]

Stewart Mintzer lives in the Los Angeles area and his poems have appeared in several online and print journals. He is presently working on ‘The Permission Slip Project,” exploring ways to encourage and invite, image, sound, and ‘medicine’ in this sweet bruising Mystery of a Life.