I had a similar event take place when I submitted my first work: it was rated poorly and then marked for deletion. I have not used that user account
since. I did, however, spend much of my time reading various writeups. I tried to find out what made a good writeup and what did not. That said, I do not believe, however, that reading others' works in order to write your own promotes conformity. Do you not read
Emily Dickinson and
Edgar Allen Poe to learn how the great poets of yesterday wrote poetry? Do you not experiment with using techniques similar to theirs in your own works? Everyone is copying from someone, everything is inspired by something that came before.
Do not give up. Perseverance is the key. I do not doubt that your poem was good. That it was reviewed and refined only strengthens my belief that it was a solid poem. All too often do I find that people use the rating system here (and on other sites such as
Slashdot) to voice agreement/disagreement with a node or a comment. It is an inherent flaw in mankind:
if you do not like something, it must be wrong.
I consider myself a new user still, despite that my homenode says I signed up almost three years ago (I have only submitted
four writeups). I have written many things since and even received praise on some of them (from a poetry teacher about an analysis paper), but only two things found their way here. You might find that if you submit your poem to a more
tangible forum, that you will still get "marked down," so to speak. But, as you stated, these forums would also provide feedback to allow you to grow as a writer. The main difference between a writing class and Everything2 is that Everything2 users consist majorly of the common everyday person. Your writing class is filled with students that are trying to learn how to write well and a teacher or professor that has dedicated this portion of their life to fostering potentially great writers. These people will rate your work not on what they think of it, but on your style and word usage and diction and other aspects important to aspiring writers.
Please do not give up. You will find that there are
nice people on
Everything2 willing to help you out and explain what may or may not be wrong with your writeup.
Sometimes I also wonder if people downvote based soley on the fact that someone is new to Everything2.