corruption in a minor key

1. If you teach, and select texts for your courses on the basis of which poets (not poetry) you like personally, or owe a favor to, or are part of an organization with, or want to impress, and not on the basis of a text’s pedagogical utility -- its value to those you were hired to teach and whose intellectual welfare is partly your responsibility -- you may be a tiny bit corrupted.

2. If you slander or libel poets you don’t know based not on information you actually have but your own personal guesses about what type of person they might be, and / or a disagreement they had with a friend of yours many years ago, and can’t find it in yourself to forgive and / or forget but instead only to pass your bitterness on to others down through the years, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.

3. If you can’t take joy in the successes of friends and / or those who are not friends but whose work you recognize as having substantial artistic merit, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.

4. If you choose when and where to write a poetry review on the basis of personal allegiances and not genuine admiration for the work you’re reviewing, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.

5. If you choose which poets to read based on anything other than your admiration for their work -- their clothes, their haircut, their power and influence, their friends, the extent to which you see them or their lives as a mirror of your own, their physical proximity to you or to someone/ something you want -- you may be a tiny bit corrupted.

Seth Abramson, Northern Poetry Review, courtesy (wie so oft) Woods Lot, the rest here