Being “That Bitch”
An admission: I loathe the word “bitch” as a synonym for anyone born without a Y chromosome. Hearing it tossed around in conversation as a general term for women makes me mad enough to stand on a chair.
But, like any other word, there are times when it, and only it, will do. I’ve been called a bitch because of my opinions about poems. Although it stings, I can’t completely dodge it.
My friend Bernie, a great writer and wit, points out that in the land of academia there are two types of writing instructors. Some give their students boundless approval and encouragement. Others judge the poems and insist on a standard of quality in the writing itself. They recognize that good poems exist and are different from bad ones.
Bernie notes the nurturers get good reviews from their students. So do the judge-y ones — if they happen to be male. In terms of poetry, a man who’s hard to please is an exacting master. A discerning woman is That Bitch.
For this and other reasons, I don’t teach. Despite my genuine love for other humans, I am not a poetry mom. I have no free-flowing milky breast of positive regard for bad poems, which are different from good ones.
Poetry moms and dads are saints when you’re starting out. You feel like a little kid gathering around Jesus’s snowy hem, gazing upward at a radiant, come-unto-me smile.
I remember how, early on, a comfy nest of mutual approval felt great. It was fun to be in poetry classes or workshops with a beneficent poetry parent in the front of the room. We were all learning and discovering together and pointing out only the good things in everyone’s work. I’m grateful for those patient souls who read my doggerel, endured my young pretensions, and said I had potential. Even more important, I appreciate their cultivating my love for poems, which enriches nearly every day of my life.
Good poets can grow, thrive and build confidence in an atmosphere of unconditional love. So can bad ones.
As the saying goes, while everyone is entitled to create, no one who makes poems or any other kind of art is entitled to an appreciative audience, let alone remuneration.
Writing seriously outside of the classroom is riding a dirt bike without wearing a helmet. It’s hard enough to write the poems, and poetry biz is a bloody cage. The wipeouts can be scary. One time when I was reading my poems at a hipster joint in Baltimore, a guy kept balling up pieces of paper and throwing them at me. I’ve been talked over, roundly laughed at and told to show my breasts. I’ve had manuscripts ripped raw. Submittable’s long list of my rejections doesn’t even hint at how hard and dispiriting it can be.
But the hardest thing: the mad stacks of deeply shitty poems I’ve written.
In youth, it was a lot of purple trauma whining, sugary power pop, virtue signaling, breathless vampire bodice-ripping, sodden self-pity. My more mature bad poems are victims of overwriting, sloppy editing, or no editing at all, when my mild bipolar issues momentarily convince me I sneeze genius.
Acknowledging my bad poems is not modesty or self-hatred. It’s making my ego subservient to an objective truth: Good poems exist. They are different from bad ones.
Likewise, my haughtiness about others’ poems is not misanthropy. But no matter how charming and noble and kind and strong someone is, how witty and reliable and decent and handsome and considerate and warm and lovely — If they write a bad poem, I won’t say it’s good. I am that bitch.