. . .criticism is to poetry as air is to a noise: it allows it to be heard; and even if we can't see it or feel it, it is there, shaping how we hear.
In what I have come to name a Goddess-oriented spirituality, the attitude toward the body is opposite to that in the mainstream Judeo-Christian tradition. Dirt, blood, sex, soul, earth, death, animal are not destined to be transcended; as direct embodiments of the immanent sacred, they by extension are sacred. The traditions of Christianity, Buddhism, and other religions may tell us mystically that God is present in everything (“I draw water, I carry wood; that is my prayer,” says the monk in one of my earliest favorite stories,) but the notion of the Goddess actually constitutes a physical presence. Not only is the Goddess of the world; the world is her manifestation. Though the transcendent god and the immanent goddess are complementary sides of the same human spiritual coin, their resonances are fundamentally different.
the next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern.
Criticism is like politics: if you don't make your own you are by default accepting the status quo and are finally yourself responsible for whatever the status quo does to you.
