I was on DeviantART

because I look through the DDs every morning to see if anything catches my eye (though I usually give all literature DDs a look regardless if they look interesting or not; not every piece of a literary work is displayed in the thumbnail dA gives you. That, and there's usually only two of them...)

And, on one of the DDs (wonderful poem, btw, though a bit confusing at first)
http://greenleo94.deviantart.com/art/the-day-we-died-266190418
I found something that bugged me

It wasn't in the poem itself

but there was a comment

down in the comments section where else?

and in said comment, the person who wrote it basically took the poem and ripped it to shreds. And not like a critique or metaphorically or... whatever the word is I'm searching for here.

They went through and were like "this phrase should be taken out" or "this phrase sounds weird" and "perhaps this would sound better"

You don't DO that.

Not in poetry

Poets write their poems a specific way, using seemingly unnecessary words to convey a certain flow. You don't tell them to take some of those words our because they look useless to you.

I mean, I guess it's alright to tell them "this phrase sounds weird" because maybe you just didn't understand it

But don't tell a poet to take words out of their poem. Those words are there for a reason.

Besides, the words/phrases this person wanted to take out completely reduced the poem to nothing. It no longer made sense with their edits.

Agh

Granted, the author of the poem was nice and was just like "thanks for the comment" and moved on

I wish I could've done something like that

If this had been on one of my poems, I would've chewed this person out.

Sorry

This just frustrates me.

You don't do something like this to a poem.

It's one thing when you're going through prose, and telling the author about unnecessary words/phrases that distract from the overall story.

But words are everything in a poem. You don't remove them willy-nilly for the mere purpose of wanting to "condense" the poem because it's "got a lot of unnecessary wording" (which really isn't unnecessary) and would "evoke more emotion from you if it was shorter"

And may I say again that the "edits" this person made to the poem killed it? With those edits, the poem stopped telling a story, and made many of the phrases confusing/useless without their removed counterparts.

Okay

I'm done

Expect a Journal Dump later today, provided my internet isn't giving me issues. My mom said it wasn't working at all this morning, and it was a bit... clunky when I got on. But, it seems to be working for the most part...