Three reasons your poems aren't as good as you think they are

You can't judge your own poems because they are yours. But I thought I would break it down more precisely. 

1) The first reason is that people tend to judge themselves to be better than they are across the board. So more people will thing they are above average than below average no matter what we are talking about, poetry or cooking....   

2) The second reason is that you confuse your own emotion with the poem that is the result of it. So everything you felt when writing it, you think is in the poem, including the effort or the  excitement of writing it. But the reader just sees the words, with no access to your feelings. If you look at poems you wrote a long time ago, having forgot the emotion of writing it, you will see that those poems from the position of a reader who doesn't know you. 

3) The third reason is that your poem could be good, in fact, but that it is good mostly for someone with your own taste. This third reason is actually not a reason why your poem isn't good, but simply a reason why other people might not share your opinion. They might not only dislike your work, but also your favorite poet. 

For # 3, you probably shouldn't care whether people of opposite preference will like what you write. You can't do much about #1, either. That's just human nature. For # 2, it's just important not to confuse the emotion behind the poem with the possible emotion for someone else reading it. 

Deadly

Someone gave me a book of literary criticism and I took it on this last camping trip. I realized that this person is very smart and knowledgeable but the writing, the ideas, everything really, is deadly. If every page of mine just has some life to it, then I will be doing ok.  

Enemies

In meditation certain insights come, both over the long haul and in certain flashes. In zen we call things "delusions," so it has to do with delusions that disappear and leave room for more skillful thoughts. For example, I used to have enemies, but I don't need them anymore. In other words, the concept of an enemy isn't particular useful, and not thinking of enemies leaves more space in the mind for more useful ideas. 

Now, there are people I like and people I like less, there are people whom I agree with more, or less, but there is nobody right now for whom I feel enmity beyond that. If someone were to wish me harm, then I would be an enemy for that person, but I am not obliged to wish harm on that person. I would try to protect myself, but that is it. 

 I'm sure I could feel enmity under extreme circumstances, but it would take something very serious to do it. If someone gets angry at me, I don't have to reciprocate; nothing obliges me to. Looking back, having enemies never actually benefited me in any way, even if my feelings seemed justified at the time. 

(I do feel some anger against that poet who passes off his own work as that of others in a kind of reverse plagiarism. People like anger because it gets them excited and hence not bored. I'm no different in that, but often in retrospect it seems stupid. I spent a lot of energy dissing Luis García Montero and defending myself when others didn't like it. It is fairly exhausting!)  

Of course, you could say now that I am powerful, so that few people are in the position to do me harm anyway, so in that sense my letting go of the idea an enemy seems logical and not particularly virtuous. That's a fair criticism. So do vulnerable people need enemies? Does the concept help them. It could. In my experience, when I had enemies it was when I felt vulnerable myself (before tenure), but I think I would have been better off enemyless even then. 

***

What about Trump, then? Surely negative feelings come up. I should do things to counter his influence and work against the things he promotes. The negative feelings themselves are justified, but they have zero effect on Trump himself or his power. In fact, the seething anger against him just seem to bolster him. 

Growing Pains

I am having intellectual growing pains. I turn 60 in a month, so this might seem strange. Really, though, if you are not having growing pains at every stage or your career, you are not doing things right. For me it is an almost physical sensation of my brain expanding with new understanding. It is closely tied to music, since I'm working on music now. 

Now obviously these will be more pronounced or perceptible at certain times. At other times it will feel like a plateau, or a gradual increase in breadth or depth of knowledge. Looking back on grad school, I see the papers I wrote were very smart. I won't criticize them at all. I became an established scholar at a young age, so I was doing something right. 

Now, however, I am feeling my work getting even better, with a deeper knowledge and engagement with the subject matter. When I look at other people's work, I often notice that it does not have the qualities that I most value in my own work, but I respect what they are doing if is good enough. If I held everyone to my standard it would be lonely and frustrating to be in the field at all. When I do a tenure or full professor case, I just happily embrace the merits of the person. I've decided not to do any except in the cases where I can be 100% positive.  

I am not known for humility, but it comes through in a kind of methodological principle that states that there is always more that I don't know than what I do. So learning something new that I should have known before reminds me that there are other things I will learn tomorrow that I should have learned yesterday or ten years ago.  

Dream of Guilt

I dreamed I was guilty of having killed X. The details were fuzzy, the but this person had not reappeared when expected and I was quite sure of my responsibility. When I was waking up I was trying to figure out the validity of the dream. I had to actually reason it out, since I know I have not seen anyone physically aside from my friend and some grocery cashiers in several weeks. 

Starving the inner critic

I've been told that not everybody has a strong inner critic sniping at them all day. This is the voice in your head that tells you you aren't good enough. Here are some ideas I have about starving the inner critic:

1. Give it a humorous name. Mine is Boris, after the cartoon villain the Bullwinckle cartoon. You can even imagine a cartoonish accent, like that of the cartoon. 

2. Give it five minutes a day. I learned this from a therapist.  You sit down for five minutes and just listen to everything the critic has to say, then you ignore it for the next 23:55. 

3. Don't argue with it. Realize that, by definition, this voice will only be critical. It's incapable of anything else.  Don't argue against it, ever. Just say, Oh, that's Boris. If you engage with it you are giving it a kind of legitimacy that it doesn't really deserve. Even if what Boris says has elements of truth, that doesn't mean he's ever right. Listening to the inner critic is just a bad habit. 

Love Letters from God

This guy Ladinsky who does the fake Hafez translations, translating apocryphally from texts that don't exist, also has a book called Love Letters from God, in which he combines some fake Hafez with some fake Santa Teresa and San Juan, Rumi, etc...  It is so obviously fake that it will attribute to some medieval mystic the idea that someone needs "professional help" in the Oprah-era, new age sense of the term. The anachronisms in themselves are hilarious. Every poem is centered on the page in a ridiculous way.

I downloaded it to my kindle just because I needed to see how bad it really was. I don't think there is anything to be done about this, because there is no law being broken that I can tell, not even violation of intellectual property. I am sure there is cultural appropriation galore, but that is a dubious concept because nobody owns a culture. I'm sure I should save my outrage for better things, but this guy should get what's coming to him, whatever that is. I can't even imagine a fit punishment since I do not advocate violence.