Okay, since I am procrastinating from REAL WORK I will make this long story short.
A rather erudite and somewhat pompous mentor of mine used to give me some pointers about my poetry back before I entered college, and was criticizing my focus - i.e. putting too much weight on the insignificant and glossing over the important bits in my writing.
His big thing was that saying that art should be sexy. It should make people want to have sex with the artist. As a 20 year old that explanation worked for me. But he would chide me that my poems were UNsexy, that instead of being like soft core porn they contained too much gynocological detail to be interesting for anyone else to read. Most of that was me trying to be "clever" (which is the death of most things, but poetry especially).
So he'd mark up parts of my poems with "GD."
Speaking of being clever, I had intended to go to Bard College at one point so I could study with John Ashbery - a real asshole but THE REAL DEAL when it comes to being a professional poet (as much as anyone is ever a professional poet) and I sent him a long long letter once with some poems when I was applying there, and he sent my poems back to me with a note scrawled on the back of one of them:
"Dear Jough,
No one cares how smart you are.
-- John"
Sure, he was a dick about it, but it's a good lesson, and something that I needed to hear at the time.