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[Angeline]

Now, my dear friend, let me assure you that I believe it took courage and maturity to come back here and apologize after that display of juvenile petulance.

The next thing you have to understand is graciousness. Your post would have been gracious if it were limited to the part that I quote above. All that other stuff is along the lines of making the same mistake you made when you argued about the validity of people's comments to your poem. When you ask what people think, you should listen carefully and ponder what they think. If you then want to discuss what they are thinking, couch your remarks in such a way as to not invalidate the opinions of those who have taken the trouble to consider your work. What you did in response to comments on your poetry, and are doing in the rest of this apology entry, is argue adversarially. For example, this sentence of yours is worth looking at by way of clarifying my point:

Isn't arrogance then, if trying to explain my reasoning, for you to shoot me down as arrogant simply because I'm offering a rebuttal?

There is no point in “offering a rebuttal” to someone's solicited opinion. There is a world of difference between the act of “trying to explain my reasoning” and “offering a rebuttal” and yet you use both phrases to refer to the same thing. This suggests you are confused about the nature of the activity you were involved in rather than arrogant.

To me, you appeared defensive and defensiveness is very tiresome when it is addressed to someone who was not really attacking you at all. Your defense/rebuttal/whatever was counter-productive because it arrested the discussion on the effect of your poems on your readers. For an aspiring poet, surely the effect of your poems on your readers is far more important than trying to justify the techniques that have not worked on the readers you are in discussion with.

If you had truly been trying to explain your reasoning it would not have sounded as defensive as it it did and this discussion would have run a very different course. Your approach would have been way more productive if your approach had been something like:

“OK, what I was trying to do there but failed to do was to yada yada yada."

Then your critic would be able to say: “Oh, so that is what you were trying to do. Maybe if you did x, y and z it would be more effective,”

or: “Oh, so that is what you were trying to do. The trouble is that that didn't work for me because yada, yada, yada.”

The point I am trying to make is that it is not worth defending your work if your defense puts people off and destroys communication. You have to respond to people in such a way as to make them want to keep up the discussion. If they walk away from you, it is utterly fruitless to blame them for walking away; you have simply failed to engage them.

Hearing criticism of the techniques you have thought long and hard about and for which you feel a certain satisfaction is hard to take. One's ego instinctively wants to defend what one believed is a personal achievement. But the things that one's ego values can range from the most excellent to complete trash and therefore, whenever you ego prompts you to jump to the defence of something you do or have done, it is far better to laugh at your ego than to sneer at your audience.

When a post angers you, NEVER respond until you have had time to consider the possibility that the post which angers you may have a valid point and if they don't seem justified in saying what they have said to anger you, wait for the anger to pass before you respond.

Finally, and most important of all
Humans communicate on many levels and one of the most important levels is in the realm of body language. Because body language, tone of voice, volume, etc are absent from the written word one has to be supremely careful about taking offence in written discussion forums like this one. This is the reason why spoken English is quite distinct from written English. The formality of written English is necessary to minimize misunderstandings that can occur when the body language component of the communication is not there. Spoken English allows for much of the formal rules to be dispensed with because of what is communicated in the body language.

This is not a formal English sentence: “Mmmm.” because it could communicate any number of opposite meanings. When it is spoken with a certain incantation it can mean "Yes” and with a different incantation it can mean “Fuck off! You're bothering me.”

This is excellent advice imo. When you can get past your own defensiveness about what you write (and everyone feels that, everyone), you begin to learn. Lessons can come in so many forms that what may seem like an insult or meaningless at first can be the very thing that helps you become better in some small way. Those inches accrue and one's writing improves. When you're defensive your mind closes to other possibilities.

 

[lorencino]

This is excellent advice imo.

(Understand that the above response was made in the heat of the moment without forethought)

 

[Epmd607]

(Understand that the above response was made in the heat of the moment without forethought)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mU2IetBZ93Y

 

[UnderYourSpell]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mU2IetBZ93Y

hells bellsssssssss that's loud