Lit Gloss

by Liz Spikol

The hard thing about writing poetry—aside from the fact that by doing so you’re embarrassing yourself—is that you’re necessarily doing it in a vacuum. You’re not going to show it to your friends (if you want them to remain friends), and if you submit poems and they get rejected, chances are you won’t get a thoughtful critique. But there are websites that can help, like Mimesispoetry.com. The editor in chief is James AL Midgley, who’s also the gallery director of poetry for deviantART, the largest online international art community in the world. Midgley is joined by Janna Layton and Mark Yoxon, who’s apparently developing the prose section of the journal, which means he’ll soon be deluged with first-person pieces about tying one’s shoelaces. But the website’s Poetry Workshop is open to any and all comers who want to run their verse by an audience of like-minded folk. Take an example by a user who calls himself TheHungerArtist and wrote a poem called “Letter to Barton Fink.” A “letter to” is always a dicey proposition, made more so when the addressee is a fictional film character. But TheHungerArtist’s touching plea—“I could not bear the thought of you/ not resting lightly on a stretch of beach”—has some really nice moments, bringing both praise and constructive criticism from (username) gekko, who’s from Bangalore, India. It’s not clear, though, that gekko knows who Barton Fink is, since they ask for more “personality in the poem, both of the author and of Barton Fink, and what their relationship is/was.” That misunderstanding, however, actually brings a new reading to the poem, which is kind of revelatory. The best thing about the forums, which are still evolving, is the sort of relaxed esprit de corps. It’s utterly nonthreatening.