Apparently, if you ask wine experts to match the tasting notes to the wine, not only are they unable to identify them on the basis of other people’s notes (beyond obvous things like ‘it’s a sauvignon blanc’ or ‘it’s oaky’), they are unable to identify them on the basis of their own tasting notes from a few months ago. In other words, all that stuff they come out with (“I’m getting a slight hint of candle-stubs and grass”) is too impressionistic to be really informative.
Presumably the same would apply to a lot of poetry reviews.
2 replies on “A flask of wine, a loaf of bread, – and thou”
I feel precisely that way about working on student poetry.
What, that the poems are too impressionistic to be really informative, or your comments?