I wouldn’t have the guts—or, in my case, foolhardiness—to post poetry I’d written on the internet. Gotta admire you and Katherine and Amanda for having much more talent and courage than I do.

I liked the idea of coffee as a burnt offering.

Two of the three you mentioned have enough talent, I think, that bravery may have little to do with it. I’m happy to claim courage as my virtue, though.

Why is it that poetry seems particularly risky to share? That something about it seems so easily risible, so vulnerable to derision? I ask because I share your sense, honestly: what’s more embarrassing than a poem written, once-loved, and now seen as poor?

When I posted this, I was too weary of self-sabotage to worry about it.

…honestly: what’s more embarrassing than a poem written, once-loved, and now seen as poor?

Compiling and organizing a collection of poems for my thesis has made me even more keenly aware of this feeling. There’s so much poetry I’ve written that just isn’t interesting or well-crafted enough for inclusion.

I’ve never been particularly daunted by posting poetry online. Even submitting my work to journals for more rejections is not as difficult as it used to be. What takes courage for me is reading in public. I’m more than a little afraid about reading and defending my poetry to a room full of classmates, professors, family, and friends in just over two weeks.

But about the poem. Nate, I love coffee and have recently given it up completely along with all caffeine due to the heart condition I’ve developed. So coffee leading to reflection on Abraham and sacrifice is perhaps more beautiful and emotionally loaded for me than most readers. I would love to see a title for this poem that resonates with the end of the ninth line. I’ll have to come back and read this again when I am less immersed in my own poetry. Thanks for sharing!

Amanda: for me, reading a poem in public (though I’ve never had to do it in situations as demanding as those you mention) is a bit easier: at least I’m there to defend myself! There’s something about the internet, where a person is free to quietly find my poetry utterly awful, think less of me, and all without my knowing it that’s daunting.

That’s a marvelous and new perspective on the element of sacrifice in the poem, Amanda, and may I say that I’m very sorry you’ve had to give up coffee. I’ve been falling in love with it all over again over the last year. I’m delighted that you zeroed in on the end of line 9: for me, that’s absolutely the heart of the poem. I’ve written a number of poems vaguely like this: attempts to express gratitude for the small, physical things that help us live lives through our work and other necessities, rather than just struggle through them. I always end up tying it back to the physical aspects of the Mass, since the Mass has a very similar role in my life.

I approve of such things. People need to be less afraid of being creative, being themselves, on the internet or elsewhere. Someone twittered about my sheep video “I wish I were as creative” and I wanted to say go forth! be as creative! it’s not hard! I don’t like this whole idea that content must be professional or semi-professional, or that it’s somehow an imposition to create something that’s not. There should be art springing up at every corner of the internet. That’s my 2 cents anyway.

In a reading I just did for a class, the author was lamenting that too often people get in the mind set that “artist=gifted” and so muggles just can’t do it. You only have to look at little children to see that if given half a chance, they’ll create pictures, tell stories, sing songs, make faces, and create art to their hearts content. Somewhere along the line, though, that impulse gets stamped out by a need to “be serious”. We all need to recapture that creative spirit.

I’m not sure that I disagree with either of you, Erika or Neil, but have you never had experiences on the internet where you feel embarrassed for the openness with which a person promotes his or her rather awful creations? Some of the amateur campaign videos for Secretary Clinton come to mind (one, two).

There’s something strange about the way the Internet combines attributes of communication between friends of like minds in a living room and global distribution. Are there some things we should keep between friends? There was a calculus at work in my decision to post this, as much as, to a certain degree, I cut it short. I liked it more and believed it to be objectively better than others I haven’t posted and felt, at least loosely, comfortable with its quality representing me to visitors to my website. Is it the necessity of that calculus that makes it so potentially embarrassing? It makes me potentially vulnerable not merely to the crime of writing bad poetry, but of not having the taste to know that it’s bad.

I suppose I’m edging toward questions about whether there is something different about things that are embarrassing from things that are merely non-professional. Erika, your 12-second videos strike me as good examples of things that encompass very little risk: they’re either charming or uninteresting, but not possibly embarrassing. The self-limitation to twelve second helps that, as does the adroit balancing of subject matter to production values. Isn’t there a knack that we very much admire, after all, of doing folk art well? Simple songs on an acoustic guitar very frequently work; imitation pop sung to a synth often makes us ache in embarrassment for the singer.

The subject of my poem made me more willing to post it: I felt there was something appropriately modest about its scale and import that made it less potentially embarrassing. Its form is unambitious: it’s neither rigidly metric nor rhymed. I even prefaced it by making sure that you knew I’d not spent very much time on it, even though I then edited it several times over the next couple of hours.

A couple of points, in disjointed and random order.

I’ve been talking on my blog recently about the feeling of wanting positive feedback, but not wanting to put oneself forward, and I think maybe this is related.

Does the embarrassment come from trying to do something “hard” and failing, while doing something “easy” and succeeding has less chance of being seen as foolish? I haven’t written poetry in years, and probably would be hesitant about posting any of it because I judge myself unskilled in that area. But in areas that I think I do well in, I have no problem posting, in so far as I fear embarrassment, but I worry that I’m only posting to sooth my savage ego. I want the strokes and I want them now.

When we offer something up, either to our friends or the world, we are releasing it into the world and no longer have control over it. Maybe this is really what is scary?

Why should a poem, any more than a short video, be any more likely to be charming rather than uninteresting?

As a personal matter, I dislike watching “embarrassing” situations, either in movies or on tv or on the internet. While some people claim shows like “The Office” are the highest form of comedy, for me, they are unwatchable because I am so uncomfortable watching the characters in those situations. I don’t watch a lot of amateur YouTube videos for much the same reason. Other people link to them because they are “funny” but what they are laughing about is the fact that someone is, in their mind, humiliating themselves. It doesn’t work for me.

…honestly: what’s more embarrassing than a poem written, once-loved, and now seen as poor?

Probably having a poem that one considers amongst the least of one’s work published in an anthology, thereafter to be mocked for all time. :)

I would post something publicly again if I felt it worthy but I can no longer see my work as anything other than projecting less than satisfactory images from the cloudy recesses of my mind. Or as Wilde put it “…art, being to a certain degree a mode of acting, an attempt to realise one’s own personality on some imaginative plane out of reach of the trammeling accidents and limitations of real life…” Once you start writing for the applause of other people you stand the chance of becoming immersed in the mire of repetition of style and content.

I agree with Nate about the subject matter being an important aspect of the willingness to share publicly. I wrote a lament for Daniel Pearl some time ago and felt that that poem should be shared despite its technical limitations.

As to coffee, well, it’s the closest I get to any form of addiction.

Hm, I don’t mean to say that there’s any obligation to embarrass oneself, or to put stuff out there without regard to quality. It’s more that there are things that are not world-class that are worth sharing— worth doing— anyway. You have to take off the critic-hat to some degree to do it though. I mean ok derivative synth-pop by wanna-be pop stars is not likely to be interesting, but there are also things that are strange and easy to criticize that are also quite original and worth doing (like Enya. Tim has this embarrassment issue with liking Enya too. I don’t particularly like Enya but I don’t see it as any different from liking anything else. Then again one of my favorite songs is by Steve Winwood— and I am a little embarrassed by that. But just a little.)