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A teacher told me my poetry was too safe and it killed my dream of being a writer.
In my junior year of college, a creative writing professor wrote one line on my final poem: 'This feels like you're afraid to say anything real.' I had wanted to be a poet since I was a kid, filling notebooks with rhymes. That single comment made me feel like a fraud. I stopped writing for fun, convinced I had nothing worth saying. I got a job in accounting instead. Now, looking back from my desk in Omaha, I think she was right. My poems were just pretty words with no guts. I don't write anymore, but I wonder if I gave up too fast. Has anyone else had a dream die from one piece of harsh truth?
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spencer7824mo ago
That line about "pretty words with no guts" really sticks with me (and I get what your professor was going for honestly). But here's the thing nobody has brought up yet - maybe the problem wasn't you being too safe, but the fact that you were writing for an audience of one person with a specific taste. Mary Oliver got rejected by tons of lit mags before people finally got what she was doing, you know? It's like if you only cook for a food critic who hates garlic, you'd think you're a terrible chef when really you just haven't found the people who love garlic bread.
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michaeltorres7mo ago
Man that's a load of crap. Since when does a poet have to be "unsafe"? Your professor had one narrow view of what good writing is. Pretty words with feeling are just as real. Look at Mary Oliver, she wrote about nature and peace and it hit people hard. You got one opinion from one person on one bad day and let it define you. That dream didn't die from truth, it died because you let a gatekeeper shut the gate.
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elliot_gibson277mo ago
Wasn't there a whole thing a while back about a poet who just wrote quiet stuff about her garden and it sold like crazy? That professor's take is so tired. Art isn't just about being shocking or angry. Sometimes the real guts of it is in making someone feel seen in a simple moment. Why do we let one person's bad opinion carry so much weight anyway?
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lee8477mo ago
Mary Oliver's book "Dog Songs" was just poems about her pets and walks in the woods. It sold a ton because people were tired of noise and wanted that quiet connection. Critics called it simple, but her readers found a lot of depth in those ordinary moments. The whole "unsafe" argument misses how hard it is to write something that actually brings peace.
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