It's hard to get into a thread kleinbl00 has already bombed and say anything except "Yeah, what he said." But I'll try.

I would say, it doesn't matter what your opinion of your own work is. It really doesn't. The people whose opinion matters are the people who read it, the people who accept it and publish it in lit mags, the people who talk about it.

I almost always think my poetry is shit. I can churn out a poem that I am in love with - and by the way, being in love with something you have written is dangerous, I have learned to recognize it as a warning sign - and six months, three months, two weeks later I'll feel like it's shit. If I am in love with something I actually ask other people to rip it apart because I know not to trust my own judgment. Your judgment, especially if it is positive, just blinds you to the reality of what the work actually is. If you love something, throw it away and give it to the critics so they can tell you what a pile of dog shit it really is.

Your friends, unless they are writers themselves, are not going to give you an accurate opinion on your work. Yeah I put up original content on Hubski sometimes and sometimes people like it. It's nice, but - and no offense - it is empty. Most Hubskiers are not poetry aficionados. I really appreciate hearing from the ones who are. But a layperson's opinion on your writing is also not going to reflect reality-in-the-world-of-writing. Fuck, laypeople made 50 Shades of Gray a best-seller, and the Twilight novels.

Don't destroy it. Maybe you will hate everything you write. Maybe everyone else will still love it. Realize that no one's opinion matters except the person who wants to publish your work and the people who read it then and fuck, even then, Jesus had haters. You will too.

Opinions, all of them, good or bad, need to roll off your back like water on a duck's. Just keep doin' what you're doing because that's how you get personal satisfaction - from producing.

If you are at it to get satisfaction out of an audience that fawns over you then show it to your friends. (I don't think that's what you're at it for.) If you are at it to be happy then stop.

I second the Danse Macabre suggestion and also recommend Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. They are the two books on writing that I have been recommended by my guru as of any use. I have read both and agree.

So why do you write?

Not a rhetorical question. The answer to this question is really damn important and will determine your method.

Do you write to impress your friends?

If so, your friends are impressed. Congratulations. Your efforts have served their intended purpose and it doesn't matter if you destroy it. Your fans are even more your fans than they were before you did something to stoke their fandom. You get over your "crushing disdain" by aligning your expectations with your objectives.

Do you write to satisfy your own creative urges?

If so, revisit the shit that drives you crazy and revise it until it's awesome. Yeah, right now you start and then you cast it away 'cuz it sux but you need to let go of that, chief. Writing is rewriting and by casting it away you're taking the coward's way out. You want to write something you're proud of and you'll never get there if you keep discarding shit that you don't know how to fix. Learn to take something you hate and turn it into something you like. Do this enough and eventually you'll get consistent about it. You'll develop a style that you like. You'll learn an approach to editing that you can consistently apply with good results. It will cease to be an act of divine inspiration and become a slog, but it will be a slog you can get through and be proud of the results.

Do you write to gain a broader audience and acclaim for your works?

THEN FOR FUCK'S SAKE QUIT GIVING SHIT TO YOUR FRIENDS.

Seriously. I have no idea why amateur writers think this is a good idea. No one you know has the first fucking clue how to evaluate your writing. All they know is they don't want to piss you off and they'd love to see you succeed. So anything that they like they'll trumpet and anything that they think is valuable they'll encourage.

Write this in calligraphy and tape it to your monitor:

Art is the knack of making something out of nothing and selling it.

- Frank Zappa

You don't need to convince your friends that you're good. You need to convince utter and total strangers that would rather spit in your face than give you four bucks for your tortured, self-involved prose. That regional 'zine that is calling for entries in the back of Poets "&" Writers magazine? DOES NOT FUCKING MATTER. That indie press in Upstate New York that only prints limited edition monographs on woodblock printing? DOES NOT FUCKING MATTER. Go look up "Kindle Daily Deals." Pick a book at random. Read the reviews.

These guys. These guys matter.

The people that will write a 1000-word review for a book they downloaded for a buck matter. And honestly? It doesn't even matter if they like your book. It matters that they care enough to bitch about it. That means you touched them somehow.

You've never even approached them, have you?

'k. So check it out. Critters Critique. Used to be it was only sci fi. Now it's everything. Here's how it works. Every week, you read three examples of someone else's drivel. You provide them a critique. You do this for weeks and weeks and weeks until you've earned enough points to inflict your drivel on someone else. BAM. Suddenly you have an objective measure of your work. AND - just as importantly - you have a good sense of how your drivel stacks up against the drivel of others at your level.

I did Crit Critique for a few months. I reviewed a half dozen pieces. Several that I panned were published. Doesn't mean they didn't suck. Does mean that they didn't suck enough to not get published. Which - really - is an objective measure of non-suckitude no matter how much I denigrate it.

Do this until you have an objective sense of your writing.

That's it.

That's the schtick.

Okay, fine. You want some more?

1) Read this goddamn book. I don't care how you regard Stephen King. Dude knows how to write. More importantly, dude knows how to write shit that will sell. This book is in two parts. Part 1 is basically "Hi, I'm Steve King. Here's the journey of how a vaguely troubled student from Maine became New York Times Bestselling Author Stephen King and how I nearly fucked it all up." Part 2 is basically "Hi, I'm Steve King. Here's how I approach my job - not my craft - of continuing to be Stephen King. Others do things differently, and not everything works for everyone, but here's the basic approach that works for me."

2) Put it aside until you've gotten through the uncanny valley of suckitude. Me? I'm 100% aware that my regard for my writing cycles from "It's brilliant" to "it's iffy" to "it's shit" to "it's redeemable" to "it's not bad but it could be better." With screenplays, I can tell you how long the first four stages last down to the day.* With novels? I'm still working on that but it's definitely related to page count.

TL;DR: PRACTICE

Have you ever taken a writing workshop? A lot of what workshopping is, is to help people figure out why they write the way that they do and to get perspectives on how other people who write view the work and why. This format is typically brutal and can be quite good at toughening people up for when they do begin submitting work.

One of my mentors died three days ago and he was considered by some to be one of the greatest living American poets. In his view though, he was an utter failure and utterly unimportant as a poet. In fact, I (and I'm not alone in this, I'm sure) think he might have garnered much more critical acclaim had he been less prickly and less interested in pushing his writing as far as he possibly could. I mean, as far as I could see, he pissed everyone off at one point or another.

I bring him up for two other reasons. One is that he was brutal and unflinching in his criticism of poetry and instilled in all his workshop students (that made it through his classes) that this particular brutality and desire to push work as far as it will go even if it's being praised, is a necessity. This personal critical eye must also be tempered with the willingness to get the shit beat out of oneself. Sure, your friends may like it, but at the end of the day they might not know what "good" is. You're right to question your work, but you're wrong to let it cripple you.

The other reason I bring him up is because he kept a blog of some of the rejection letters he received over his long career, which you can find here.

The first poem I felt pretty good about that I sent out to publication was accepted in The Emerson Review, which is a difficult market to get published in even for Emerson students. My thesis advisor was the editor of Ploughshares and he told me he thought my stuff was pretty great. But the best compliment I ever got in regard to my work was from that mentor I mentioned, Bill Knott, who said he thought I was talented. Not pretty good, not great, just talented. It was one of three compliments he gave out that semester, the others being about how one girl was good at writing abortion poems and how another guy would be a good poet if anyone (including the guy he was addressing) had any idea what the fuck he was writing about. I don't think my stuff is that great, but I don't think it's any worse (or not much worse) than stuff I see published in a lot of respected journals either. Either way, it's getting submitted somewhere.

My point is, poetry is necessarily something that makes a writer vulnerable and that's not something anyone can tell another person how to get over. I suppose you could stuff all your poems into an old drawer to be discovered upon your death, but I have my doubts as to the likelihood of that strategy succeeding twice.

Isn't that what the drugs and booze are for?

In my experience with writers and artists I have seen a few additional less classical methods.

1. Cultivate arrogance. Convince yourself that everything you do is Important and interesting most people can't tell the difference between good and bad art and if they could they would in all probability chose the bad. So tell them you are a genius and mean it they can't tell the difference anyway and will believe you. Bonus even if they don't you still do.

2.Blame it on someone else. I don't mean write pseudonymously (although that is a time honored method of ego removal and self protection) but buy into the mythology of the muse / "thank you Jesus for this gangster Rap album". Place the creative burden outside yourself. You don't get the whole credit but then again it was not all your fault.

3. Don't give a shit. Let the market decide. Tell your self a good piece of work is one that sells a bad one is one that doesn't. I find this one a difficult fit for poetry but then again it is kinda punk rock.

4. Pull the Sung Dynasty trick. There is a method in ceramics where you have a gorgeous subtle red made by suspending minute amounts of copper in the glaze It is really tough to get it to work the reduction has to be just right, the copper is fugitive at the temps required etc. Even modern potters can get it right most of the time with modern equipment. But there are tons of perfect copper red ware from the Sung Dynasty. What is the secret? No knew until a few years back archaeologists found even more tons of broken imperfect ware. The Chinese potters were getting maybe 13% good stuff and chucking the rest. If only 1% of what you write is good then write 100 times as much stuff.

5. Own it. At least self-loathing is an honest emotion.

Hmm, tough one. I never throw out old stuff or delete my work (not after I lost about 30 pages and 6+ hours of work thanks to an unforseen computercrash). I do edit a lot, scrap phrases and re-write paragraphs, fine-tune jokes and all that stuff but I never throw it away. For me, writing is because I like doing it. I don't do it for the moeny, nor for fame, nor to please my family or friends. I do it for me, and for the joy it gives me. If people like it, all the better. If they don't, I couldn't care less (criticism on how to improve it notwithstanding. Those I will check and if I feel the criticism was indeed valid, use to improve my work).

So why do you write? What is your motivation? Do you do it for yourself and for the joy of it or for another reason? Why destroy something you've created? Why the distrust in your friends' judgment? On showing it online: there's plenty of sites where you can post it anonynously, you know that. Who's ever going to find out it was you who was the author, if you don't want people to know? And even if they do, so what? it's your work. If they criticize your poems or make fun of it, maybe this anecdote helps.

A friend of mine spent quite some time in Spain and even though he could speak the language a bit, he wasn't fluent in Spanish. Several of the locals there made fun of his (to them) obvious errors and teased him. My friend, being fed up with their criticism, one evening heard them making fun again of his mispronunciation, turned around and said in his best spanish, eerily calm: 'IF you have mastered MY language the same way as I have mastered YOUR language, you may open your mouth. If you have NOT mastered my language the way I have mastered YOUR language, you can shut your goddamn gob.' A shocked silence followed, the locals exploded with laughter and a round of drinks followed soon. Ever since, whenever someone makes fun of someone else because their efforts in whatever fall short, they look at one another and just say: 'If you speak my language...' and everyone knows exactly what they mean.

In other words, people may criticize your poems if their work is vastly better. If not...

edit: a word

I've been writing and performing poetry for a couple of years now, and i've certainly gotten better at the dealing with the feeling you describe. I found the more I performed and got audience feedback (not necessarily what people said to me after, but how I felt about the performance - you know when you're holding a room in the palm of your hand) I got a better handle on what's good or not. Poems I didn't mind, I started liking. Those I disliked but knew worked, I started to be proud of. I'm still my own harshest critic, but I let myself off the hook a bit more now.

Don't get me wrong I will always write quite a lot of shit poetry, and I'll always find myself crippled with anxiety if I've written and want to perform a piece outside my comfort zone, but I've made peace with that for now. I really hope you figure your way out of these feelings and find joy in your writing once again!

Read more. I don't mean that to be trite. You start scribbling out of veneration, and this impulse is what keeps me going. I mean shit, just this year I finally read A Bend in the River, and I got my socks knocked off again. I find various pieces are greatly influenced by what I'm reading at the time. Whether feeling dizzy with the Unbearable Lightness of Being, or just thinking about the pleasure one gets from the mind in Surely you're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

I think a person is only gifted with a couple themes, but these themes have infinite depth to which you can talk about them. Find your themes .. I promise, you won't be able to hate them.

Just pump it out there under a fake name if you're embarrassed. If you're so crippled by doubt that you can't even do that, then honestly I think you have the wrong hobby.

Life needs courage.

I do the same thing as you, but with music. I've obliterated a lot of LSDJ compositions and trashed a ton of lyrics that I've written and really look at song writing and putting out music in the same way that you look at writing. Still not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing.