What I've Noticed About Much of the Poetry on Here... - Comments

I always comment on poems saying a bunch of things that need to be said. Plus, I only have the time to read poetry nowadays.

I agree with pretty much everything you've said. I feel bad saying it, because I'm sure my poetry is far from immune to the same criticism, but I wish I did get in-depth critique about what people DON'T like about my poetry. I get a lot of praise, and it's nice, but I feel like...I KNOW I'm not a perfect writer. I KNOW I have room for improvement.

And I often don't comment on other peoples' poems, because I tend to see the same kinds of things coming up over and over again--cliches, poorly executed rhythm/rhyme, etc.--and I feel like I would say the same negative comment over and over again and rarely have positives to balance it out. I would love a stronger, more matured poetry community, with thoughtful criticism and eagerness to improve and poetry that surprises me, but it's hard to find, and I don't really check the poetry section much anymore because of it.

I personally don't comment much on poems because I don't know much about them. My knowledge on literature components is very limited to the things I learned back in high school and because I was a Science stream student, we learned just the very basic components. So feel like I can't contribute much and I'm not knowledgeable enough to be criticising someone.

The least I could do is encourage them to keep writing.

Same goes to stories. English is my second language, and thus, I'm not that good in the language. I feel like I don't know enough about grammars and stuff to be correcting people on it. So again, I simply comment to encourage other writers to keep writing.

And I usually refrain myself from commenting on plot devices or the story line because it usually depends on each individual. Maybe I don't like a certain kind of plot but others might do.

I don't know, but that's just me.