This is very important for two reasons:

• Having another eye look at and ear listen to your poetry can help bring out improvement suggestions.
• Trying to find ways to improve someone else’s work helps you learn how to write better yourself. If you find something improvable in another’s poetry, the same may apply to your own.

This book started as a collaboration between two poets who were looking to help each other improve writing skills. It is a better book for having several poets contributing with different experiences, different writing styles, different ideas about writing, and different examples to show the points being made. The first ideas written in this book were the result of one person taking a hard look at another poet’s poetry. While it was expanded through interviews and soliciting ideas from other poets, at base it is still the same: a quest to capture experiences to help a poet write better.

Another thing that critiquing can be is a type of collaboration. In a full collaboration, both would contribute to the writing. In critiquing, it might be one doing all the writing while the other just makes some suggestions along the way. Like with other collaborations, you can find someone to work with who will fill in your weaknesses with strengths.

In this information age of ours, we can get in touch with poets from all over the planet through poetry message boards and online workshops. Some are linked from this page: Links. Somewhere out there is another or several poets you can work with to improve your writing.