The Spider's Poetry Workshop

Went to a poetry workshop at a local library. Being new in town, seemed an obvious way to find friends with a similar interest.

Within five minutes it was obvious that this “poetry workshop” was actually a narcissist’s little emotional abuse racket.

An obvious opportunity for a narcissist. People are revealing themselves emotionally when they write poetry. So this is the ideal time to belittle them; they are vulnerable. The downside, from the narcissist’s perspective, is only that he or she will have no idea about poetry. But if the level of the participants is low enough, this will not become evident.

As soon as I entered the room, the guy beside me handed me a page of rules for the group. In summary:

- People read their poems in order of arrival.

- Others comment around the table in turn, starting from either left or right.

- The author should not participate or respond

- Feedback should be about the poem, never the author

- Feedback should include praise as well as “constructive suggestion.”

“Workshop participants must always remember that comments are never about ‘you’ but about the poem. Participants must refrain from judging a work based on political or personality differences – comments should never be made or received as personal.”

Can you see the problem? Superficially, it seems almost reasonable. But note the concluding paragraph makes it impossible for anyone to object to a personal attack—the moderator, if he is so inclined, can easily accuse them of breaking the rules by TAKING the comment as personal. The idea that the author should remain silent as others comment on the work is bizarre, and seems designed to permit abuse. Natural justice requires that defense as well as prosecution must present their case.

So alarm bells were immediately going off on seeing this sheet of rules.

And the very next thing that happened was—the moderator himself broke these rules.

I was sitting to the immediate right of the first participant. By the rules, I should have commented first; or else comment should have begun with the first person on the left, and moved on from there. Instead, the moderator just started to comment, ignoring the rule. He was seated to my right.

Typical narcissism: rules do not apply to them, only to the little people.

The moderator took the author to task for a line in which she said there was dew on the ground. Wrong, he said, there cannot be dew on the bare ground.

This was surely just finding fault. “Dew on the ground” is a common construction. Google it, if you like. Why would you assume there was no grass on the ground?

The author at this point, rightly, also ignored the rules. She tried to defend herself.

“But then you would have to indicate that there was grass,” he responded, “you didn’t.”

She had. The first line of the poem says she is in a park.

The whole point was apparently finding fault, somehow, with what she wrote. And on some purely pedantic grounds. Something that did not require any understanding of poetry. And there was perhaps a special reason for this particular objection: the author needed "ground" here for the rhyme. There was no question of simply substituting another word. She would have to substantially rewrite the poem. The moderator was, figuratively, shoving a rod in her spokes.

At this point, with nobody else defending her, I stepped in by noting that I saw no problem with saying “dew on the ground.”

At which the moderator wheeled on me for “breaking the rules.”

I had dread the rules—they are given above.

I pointed out that there was no such rule—only a rule that the author should be silent. Which was itself not being followed. He ignored this, and repeated the accusation.

At this point, the narcissism was obvious. If rules do not apply to narcissists, neither do either reason or evidence. What is so is simply whatever they want to be so. They will lie even when the lie has to be obvious to both parties. Gaslighting.

I perhaps should have left then. I did not.

Others present remained silent and submissive. The comments continued, moving away from me.

This first poem was indeed awful, although not without a few good lines. But their comments were no more insightful than his. Not one of them said anything good about the poem, and neither did he. It was only criticism, and not constructive. Pedantic and arbitrary. So much for the stated rules.

This again sounds like narcissism. As long as you say you are doing the right thing, you get to do whatever you want. And I suspect that this tone of constant negativity was set by the moderator over time. It was set up and designed as a bullying session. Everyone else, as usual in such situations, were recruited as his flying monkeys, on pain of being turned on and berated as the new scapegoat.

Finally, after everyone else had spoken, he had no choice but to allow me to participate. I pointed out several good things in the poem, and made my suggestions. One—the last one—was that she hyphenate the word “heart-felt” in the last line to give it the right rhythm. This was not standard spelling, I pointed out, but it is acceptable in poetry to deviate.

At which the moderator butted in—breaking the rule he had himself declared a few minutes earlier, that nobody else should speak while one of us was commenting—to suggest that the author look in the dictionary to see how the word was spelled.

This was transparent bullying, as I had just said this was not standard spelling. I pointed this out, and he declared again that I wasn’t following the rules. Typical narcissistic projection. Presumably in his mind it was “breaking the rules” to defend against his attack or in any way to make him look bad.

What was the point of continuing this charade? He was a blatant narcissist, sitting there like a vast malicious spider with his prey around him in his web. I certainly did not need to be involved. I felt sorry for the others, but then, they were all sitting there taking it week after week. As flying monkeys, they would not be on my side.

And such a “Stockholm syndrome” response to abuse is not unusual in the least. Melancholics are like that. And it is melancholics who are drawn to things like writing poetry. Having been abused and emotionally crushed in childhood, they just accept that they are getting what they deserve whenever a new abuser latches on to them. I felt truly terrible for them, and I figured I was doing just what the narcissist would want in leaving, but all I could do unless I felt like being a martyr for the umteenth thousandth time was call him out, and leave. Not my circus; not my monkeys.

Which is what I did: called him a bully and a narcissist to his face, and told the women present that they were his victims. And left.

I doubt it made an impression on any of them.

I just wish as a society we had a mechanism for dealing with this kind of narcissistic abuse. Instead, as in this case, the narcissist is more often than not able to present themselves as the voice of authority—here backed by the public library system. Because the narcissist will always seek such power, and we have no checks or protections against giving it to them. Appeasement is our usual instinct.

For my part, at least I can say I have learned how to spot a narcissist quickly. Years ago, I would probably have tortured myself about it, refusing to believe what was obviously happening was happening.