The Importance of Peer Readers

93º ~ Feels like 104º ~ stay inside weather for the foreseeable future, even running errands between air-conditioned buildings is exhausting ~ cicadas are singing again


This week, a good poetry friends reached out to ask if I'd look at a draft of a poem and offered to look at one of mine in return. Perfect timing! I've been racking up poem drafts pretty regularly for the month of July, and many of them are through the first awkward revision stages and can stand on their own. However, I lack all confidence in the work, so it was great to do a poem exchange.

In the past, for many of the poems I published prior to The Alchemy of My Mortal Form, I had peer readers provide feedback at some stage of drafting. This feedback took the form of both global and local comments. By that I mean, I asked my peers to let me know their general impression of how the poem was working, what message it was giving, but I also looked for and received marginal notes on places that might need tightening, words that clunked, form that sagged, etc.

For a handful of poems in Alchemy I received this kind of feedback as well; however, after a certain point, the sickly speaker was so strong in my head, and each poem so connected the one to the other that I fell out of the habit of sharing the work with early readers. In fact, I didn't send the manuscript of the book to anyone before I started submitting it to presses. I was simply that confident in the whole of it.

Alas, since I finished that book, I've gone back to square one and feel like a beginner again. I see what I've drafted; I can identify the poetic elements that are working, but I am all staggering, weak-kneed foal when thinking about sharing any of these poems.

So, when I shared this recent work, I asked my friend to simply tell me what she got from what I'd written and to throw up a flare if the poem seemed too sentimental, as I'm back to writing more autobiographically rather than with a clear & separate persona. When I received her feedback last night, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. She got it. [The key is to make sure your peer readers are skilled at offering feedback without simply blowing kisses back at you.]

All of this is to say that no matter how much experience I have, no matter how much success, hanging on to a sense of confidence is difficult for me without peer readers. So thank you to my friends who have served in this capacity. I'm grateful.