Thoughts on giving feedback?

here's a thought + question I have about poetry criticism + commenting.

I was struck by Jessica's feeling pressured to respond in a certain way, struck by her comment about lit criticism being a contest of "whose dick is bigger".

I was struck -- and then I remembered my actual experience with literary criticism, poetry workshops, commenting, and then I thought "oh yeah, that's how it is a lot of the time."

Criticism and poem commenting seems pretty touchy to me -- a lot of the stuff that I've sent to y'all, and shared in workshops has been pretty raw (maybe generally somewhere between first and third drafts? with most things being first drafts) -- and in a sense, not exactly ready for comments. I mean, if you were trying to make an awesome cake, you wouldn't taste the batter five minutes after putting the thing in the oven! Or maybe you would, because it would probably be delicious (but use gloves, it's hot!) -- but you wouldn't then ask, "Does this work as a cake?", would you?

And of course, different people have different ideas of what makes a poem good -- or even what makes a poem at all! What is one man's jibber jabber is another woman's poetry, and vice versa (with all the genders!). I remember Ken Mikolowski strongly encouraging me not to take critical comments of other's too seriously, because of this fact.

If everyone in a poetry workshop took all of the critical comments to heart, he said, the resulting poetry would be some sort of bland average of everyone's poetic sensibilities. Of course, he said it without using a term less pretentious than "poetic sensibilities," -- but the end idea is that uniqueness would disappear, completely! [hyperbole]

And of course, there's the problem that critical feedback can discourage poets (poets are reputed to be of variable self-esteem) from writing poems at all! Of course, this is hard too, because you gotta write some shabby stuff to get to the good stuff -- but what if you're sensitive to feedback (as I often am) and someone says "this is a shabby poem!" You might stop writing before getting to the good stuff!

So then the question I have for you right now is -- what do you think is a helpful way to respond to a poem? Of course I have my own thoughts about this, and I'd be glad to share them, but I'm a different person than most of you, and I'm more excited to hear what you think.

What makes a helpful poetry comment for you? And do you have any other thoughts about commenting that you'd like the share?