The Critic Who Made Me Better and Bitter
His review was cruel, accurate, and the reason I rewrote everything.
The letter was four pages long, handwritten in blue ink, and it described my poems as greeting cards for people who have never been sad. I was twenty-four, and I had mailed those poems to the one famous writer who lived in my town, along with a cover note so fawning I still cannot think about it in daylight.
His name was Edmund Carrow. He had published nine collections, taught at universities I could not afford, and retired to a gray house at the end of Linden Street where, our whole town agreed, he wished to be left alone. I did not leave him alone. I printed twelve poems on my roommate's laser printer, bought a stamp, and asked him, in the note, whether he thought I had what it takes.
He answered the question. That is the first thing I will say in his defense. He answered it in ink, by hand, at what must have been considerable cost to his arthritis, and he answered it the way you would answer a stranger who asks if the bridge ahead is out. Plainly. Without padding. While there was still time for me to turn around.
Poem one, he wrote, rhymes like a person apologizing. Poem three mistakes weather for feeling. Poem five was written to be admired, and admiration is the weakest thing a reader can give you, and you should stop asking for it. Poem seven, he wrote, I could not finish, and I finish everything, I finished the war.
It went on like that for three pages. I read it standing at the mailboxes in the lobby of my building, and I remember the checkered floor tile, and the smell of somebody's burnt rice drifting down the stairwell, and the particular sensation of my ears going hot from the top down. A neighbor came in, said hello... and I could not make a sound.
But the fourth page.
The fourth page is the reason I am writing this and the reason I write anything.
Poem nine, he wrote, the one about your father's boots by the door, contains two honest lines. The ninth and the tenth. You know which ones they are. You have known the whole time. Burn the rest and start from those.
I did not burn the rest. I burned nothing. I put the letter in a shoebox, told everyone who would listen that Edmund Carrow was a bitter old man who hated young writers, and quit poetry for eleven months. This is the part of the story where I am supposed to say I quit dramatically, but the truth is I quit the way most people quit, quietly, by being too busy, by letting the notebook slide under the bed and stay there.
The bitterness was real and I want to give it its due. People talk about harsh criticism of your writing as if the sting is a toll booth, something you pass through in an afternoon on your way to growth. It is not. I was bitter for most of a year. I composed rebuttals in the shower. I read his famous poems looking for weaknesses the way you check an enemy's fence for gaps. That, it turns out, was the finest education I ever received, and I got it out of spite. I studied him for months, line by line, trying to catch him being mediocre, and never caught him once.
Then one wet February night I took the letter out of the shoebox to hate it again... and instead I heard it.
He was right about poem one... He was right about the weather. He was right, above all, about the ninth and tenth lines of poem nine, the ones where I stopped performing grief and just reported it, my father's boots by the door for a year after he died, and my mother polishing them each Sunday as if he were late rather than gone. I did know which lines they were... I had known the whole time. Everything else in that poem was scaffolding I had built so I would not have to stand next to those two lines alone.
Flattery pats you on the head and leaves you exactly where it found you. He was the first person who treated my poems as if they could survive the truth.
So I rewrote everything. Not revised. Rewrote, from the two honest lines outward, the way he had ordered, and it felt less like editing than like renovating a house down to the one wall that was load-bearing. Years later I read an essay about why safe poems lose, and I heard his blue ink in every paragraph of it. The rebuilt poem about my father took four months. When it was done I entered it in a monthly poetry contest, and it did not win... and I entered it again, and it placed, and the night the results went up I walked past the gray house on Linden Street and did not have the courage to knock.
I never thanked him.
That is the debt this story cannot settle. I planned to. I drafted the letter twice, and both drafts sounded like the fawning note of a twenty-four year old, so I put it off until I was a better writer, which is the most expensive form of procrastination there is. Edmund Carrow died in October, three years after he told me the truth.
The local paper gave him six paragraphs.
At the memorial, in a church hall with folding chairs and weak coffee, I met a woman my age clutching a paper folder, and when it fell open I saw four pages of handwritten blue ink. We stared at each other. Within an hour we had found five more. A retired nurse. A teenager's father, there on his son's behalf. A man who had driven four hours. All of us strangers who had once mailed our hearts to the gray house, and every single one of us had received pages back, specific, merciless, and signed. His niece told us he answered everything. Thousands of letters over thirty years, she said, an afternoon each. He just refused to lie, she said, and people mostly wanted the lie, so people mostly called him cruel.
I had called him that. In this very story I let you believe it for a while, because I believed it for a year, and being honest about my own bitterness is the closest I can now come to asking his forgiveness.
These days younger writers sometimes send me their poems and ask whether they have what it takes. I sit with the pages longer than I can afford to, the way I imagine he did. Then I write back by hand, in blue ink, and I find the two honest lines, because there are almost always two, and I tell the truth about all the rest.
Bitter is what better feels like on the first day.
Nobody had warned me. So now I am the warning, and the letter, and the shoebox, and I sign every page.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.