The essayist, poet and novelist Phillip Lopate was on my doctoral committee reviewing a draft of my dissertation. “How can you permit yourself to write so carelessly?” he demanded. And then supplied the antidote: “You must treat prose with the same care and perseverance that you put into your poetry.”
The manuscript under review had been written in my best academese. Over the years, especially after my MFA, I had come to dismiss prose writing tasks for the primacy of poetry. But here was Lopate pointing out something that should have been obvious.
When, decades later, I reminded him of this, he said, “As for my scolding you long ago, I was being a jerk (not the first time).”
But I insist his scolding had a perceptible result. From that point on, awakened to the failing, I’ve worked hard to do as he’d directed: Discard the easy, formulaic in favor of original thinking.
This is not to say that my poetry hasn’t met with harsh appraisals, as well.
I’d fumbled along for years, after early success: a book published by my university when I was twenty-two. Too early, really; the poems, for the most part, imitations. Unmasked by James Tate at Columbia University, the M.F.A. program, (“All your poems are imitations of mine!”) Well, they weren’t entirely. I did imitate others, such as my mentor, David Ignatow.
Ignatow was a well-established poet when we met, with a 72-page collection of his poems published every few years by Wesleyan University Press. I’d show David my new poems. After my book was published, I couldn’t please him. “These are shit,” he’d tell me, then go on to praise some ditty I’d scribbled on a cocktail napkin.
Lopate, who pointed me in the right direction, and Ignatow who invariably offered to heal his harsh appraisals with some compliment however small, were messengers of a positive criticism, the kind that helps writers mature, even as it stings. On the other hand, Tate’s brutal condemnation—a stick without the carrot—set me back months asking why the hell I had ever thought I could be a poet.
In any case, I did what I could with both gentle and harsh critiques and would like to believe that I’m the better for it. But I should never have concluded that I’d paid my dues, and it was time to stroll on toward that crown of laurel leaves.
For, several years later, I was writing Op-Ed columns for newspapers including The New York Times and Newsday. At Newsday, where I started, I’d been lucky to have an editor who carefully guided me to write good newspaper essays. That editor eventually left and a new one took his place.
I had already written a column assigned by the previous editor and was waiting for my next assignment when the new editor rejected the column I’d submitted. Not only did he dismiss what I’d written, he had the temerity to rewrite the piece himself, taking it in another direction.
By this time, I’d been enjoying a larger audience than I could ever have reached with my poetry. If I wasn’t yet a master of this craft, I should at least be considered a pro, someone whose craftsmanship and acuity mattered.
Unwilling to sign-off on the column as he’d re-written it, I withdrew it from consideration.
I hung around in a huff for a week, fuming at the new editor’s arrogance. The temerity! But eventually I re-read his version and came to realize, after anguished deliberation, that, in fact, his, not mine, had gone directly to the core of my original idea. His beginning, middle and ending—they really were superior to what I’d done.
I had to beg him to put it in the paper to see his version published under my byline.
It was at this point that I understood how dependent I had always been on the judgement of my mentors to decide for me whether my writing passed or failed. I realized that, if I were to continue, I’d have to discover an inner voice, a strong and unremittingly objective one, to assess my own work. It is a necessary and natural thing that writers survive their teachers. To succeed, I needed to become a writer-in-full.
My history of receiving criticism has often been humbling. Even so, I’ve profited from it. I would have been much the worse had I walked away.
Sandy McIntosh has published sixteen volumes of poetry and prose. His most recent title is Plan B: A Poet’s Survivors Manual. He and Denise Duhamel were included in The Best American Poetry for a collaboration. He was awarded a Silver Medal for a film script in the Film Festival of the Americas and received a fellowship to The John Steinbeck Memorial Library Studio, Southampton College. For ten years he was Managing Editor of Confrontation, Long Island University’s national literary journal. He has been Executive Editor and Publisher of Marsh Hawk Press, Inc. for twenty-two years.