Are you a good judge of your poetry

[Todd]

Deffinatly agree with this one.
I find it incredibly hard to self monitor the quality of my work and I would 100% say that both of the possibliities
you present would be aplicable to my experiances so far. The poems I most feel connected too...or I think I've worked, many clever little extras into are the ones which are flops and the ones I've slungdown in a almost flippant and casual way, are the one that excite others....It would seam that the more work I put into something the more likely it is to be rubbish. I'm beggining to think that I am killing them with over attention. Like a parent that smothers a child and over protects it and that what i need to do is be less precious and more relaxed with my poetry.

I notice a similar principle at work when I am reading the work of others, in that the type of poem that i most readily identify (and get) are often not remotly like the leanings of my own style.
Do you think it is a case of opposites attract?...

cidermaid: I like the comparison to over parenting. I think that's pretty true. And yes for me and other's work I have a little bit of the opposites attract thing going. When people make something I struggle with seem effortless or when I wish I'd written the poem I tend to be drawn to it.

Like Leanne I do still start with a lot of skepticism when I write something, but occasionally I start to believe and it's usually misplaced and I'm wrong.

Sometimes it isn't over parenting its I think that I'm asking the readers to make too many leaps...I do this one poem for instance where I blend Lolita with Red Riding Hood and the wolf with Humbert H. So, I'm already asking my readers to do a lot. Here's the opening:

Hunger is a breathless dance of teeth—
the smell of bricks—
I stink of it.

So, here's where I might have went overboard. The wolf is the speaker and I allude to bricks in line two. I had a reader friend scream at me after struggling with it for awhile: "Are you alluding to the three little pigs?" I was. She told me I can't do that I'm asking the readers to go too far. I'm not sure if that's true but it could be one of my issues the poems may be too layered for clarity, or I may be executing the idea poorly.