Luis de Góngora y Argote by Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Google_Art_Project
I once took a poetry writing seminar conducted by a prominent American poet based at the time in Colby College. She was already an eminence in the early stages of her career and has achieved Olympian status since. I lunched with her several times outside class and was both flattered and dazzled by her attention.
When it was my turn to share my poems with the group she dealt unsparingly with them. Her critique was withering. I deserved it. I had been a cocky participant in the sessions, perhaps inflated by imagining that she had been receptive to my extracurricular flirtations. My work was undistinguished. For a long time I kept the copies of those poems that she had marked up as relics of my abandoned aspirations to be a poet.
Years later I had a friend who was also a recognized poet with a solid body of published work to his credit. He received multiple fellowships to teach poetry in public school districts around the state. In my town he solicited poems to be considered for inclusion in an anthology of local versifiers. It was calculated vanity press, but also flattering and vivifying for the community.
I worked in advertising at the time but, encouraged by the poet, provided several old stabs of my own at creating a poem. He saw a glimmering of merit in one. What he did has stayed with me.
He proceeded to carve out the poem, such as it was, that lurked in my draft. He published it in his anthology, crediting me as its author. It was much improved. He didn’t add or rephrase anything, just selected the words that should survive and discarded the rest. It was a nurturing and generous act of editing (and of teaching).
I doubt that what I submitted for the anthology was any better than what I had submitted for the seminar. The difference was in how it was dealt with. One treatment took the wind out of my sails; the other one gave me a puff. Both approaches helped me.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]
EthicalDative 
Personal Goal
HJN, Hand. Fired clay with partial glaze.
When I was a student of literature I recall being influenced by a school of critical theory (Rene Wellek?) that said an author’s biography was irrelevant to a consideration of his or her text. Once it was loosed from the pen it had an existence of its own irrespective of the character and deeds of its author.
I think the predisposition acquired in those studies to seek a direct, unmediated confrontation with art has stayed with me as I ponder the current climate in which the work of certain artists in various media, both living and dead, is being reconsidered by some, shunned by some, in light of crimes or abuses known or alleged to have been committed by the artists. I can’t see how this serves art.
I hope that, in the realm of human conduct, decency will prevail and justice will be served where justice is due. My duty as citizen of a struggling democracy with flawed institutions is to exert myself however possible to support the good and resist the bad. Where art is concerned, my goal is to try to keep my eyes, ears and mind wide open to the art as art.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]