Just as people never tell new parents their babies are ugly (even if they are), you shouldn't ever tell someone who just read you a poem that you'd rather not have heard it, and can you have that portion of your life back, please?

Many years ago, while learning to be an adult ed trainer (yes, settle back kiddies, it's an old-person story), I came across the 'sandwich' approach to criticism. This is a means to framing whatever negative or 'constructive' feedback you have between two pieces of positive feedback.

Positve, negative, positive.

'I like the imagery,' you say, 'although the lead character didn't strike me as sympathetic. Cool name, though!'

I've continued to stick with this method of critique EVEN WHEN the slices of bread I've had to work with have been very thin indeed.

And I have never, ever admitted to a parent that their baby is ugly. I have, however, commented sarcastically that 'gee, it's amazing how very different and not-at-all-the-same babies are, eh? It's human, right*?'

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* I haven't really ever done that. Parents are fierce when roused and, like bad poets, should be approached only with great caution.

"I dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring
an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch
the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze
and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it
would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent
them sometimes -- all the better.

"Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I'd like a
criticism of scintillating leaps of imagination. It would not be sovereign or
dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms."

-Michel Foucault, "The Masked Philosopher," interview in *Le Monde,*
1980

Via Rob Breszny's Free Will Astrology newsletter