Does anyone else feel painful embarassment when re-reading your own poems?

[Oread]

I know in the back of my mind that the few poems I've written are not bad at all, but everytime I try to go back and read them I just cringe with embarassment and I can't read the whole thing. How sad, huh? =P

I might just be embarassed that I expressed my feelings so openly or for whatever other reason, who knows

[Cunninglinguist]

I'm usually not embarrassed even when I can see all the "mistakes" (if any such thing occurs in art) I made. Usually I'll just edit the poem again, and make it "better."

Perchance you don't like to look at yourself.

[Buh4Bee]

On occasion that can happen, but you can always edit something or just throw it away.

[Jerrybaldy]

no more than 99%

[Delta40]

I used to feel embarrassed but now I see them as a progressive record of my development. Fortunately, I have successfully deluded myself into thinking I have developed! - and that too is a gift....

[Dark Muse]

Usually that only happens when I re-read some of the stuff I wrote back in high school and that is not necessarily purely because of the quality of the poems, though I do like to think I have improved a bit since than, but also a lot of that has more to do with the content of the poems which I suppose does have a direct relation to quality as well since much of poetry is about the emotion and expression. And well I did not experiment as much with style back than so a lot of my older poems are like clones of each other. Now I do have a much wider range.

[Armel P]

I might just be embarassed that I expressed my feelings so openly or for whatever other reason, who knows

I guess I get around that by never really expressing feelings in poetry. But more often than not I'll read something I have written and feel like I was naive to think certain phrases were even worth writing out. Happens all the time.

[Haunted]

I cringe at most of the stuff I wrote. I rarely read them ever again.

[deryk]

Only when the other people listening to the reading have no reaction whatsoever. In which case, I'm either embarrassed to be around a vacant audience or I've failed horribly. Also, I detest everything I write. I'll explode if I stop though.

[Delta40]

Hate/Love - what a bind!

[firefangled]

What's not to love — you're expressing yourself!

Be embarassed, write about it.

One gets good at kissing by kissing.