Thanks for the link, I see they have not updated for 2009 ---
Vegetarian, yuck. A lot of the rest I can live with, but not that.
It is vital to be able to identify bad poetry, otherwise one is cursed to have to do nothing but write it oneself. The hard thing is to see when one is doing so. I can and do scrap considerable sections of work because they do not serve a purpose in the context of a story, and as I probably said before, 'Aurorielle' was revised right through four times. Without a concept of bad poetry, one cannot do so, and one cannot improve.
Yes, a lot of poetry is deadly dull. Of course not all will agree what is and is not, because that is a matter of taste, but along with my charges of technical incompetence and praising the Emperor's clothes, which I level against almost all modern poetry, I would add this; practically none of it has anything to say that is worth saying.
I do think that you have a way of expressing yourself that is worth working on, and that if you want to work on rhythm you will get there, and be very pleased with the results. But this readiness to call poetry bad or dull when it is bad or dull, is quite vital to the process of getting there.
Be passionate about something; almost anything; and then good poetry will become entirely practical, and the work of rhythm and rhyme will be worth the effort.
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Date: 2009-05-25 07:49 pm (UTC)Vegetarian, yuck. A lot of the rest I can live with, but not that.
It is vital to be able to identify bad poetry, otherwise one is cursed to have to do nothing but write it oneself. The hard thing is to see when one is doing so. I can and do scrap considerable sections of work because they do not serve a purpose in the context of a story, and as I probably said before, 'Aurorielle' was revised right through four times. Without a concept of bad poetry, one cannot do so, and one cannot improve.
Yes, a lot of poetry is deadly dull. Of course not all will agree what is and is not, because that is a matter of taste, but along with my charges of technical incompetence and praising the Emperor's clothes, which I level against almost all modern poetry, I would add this; practically none of it has anything to say that is worth saying.
I do think that you have a way of expressing yourself that is worth working on, and that if you want to work on rhythm you will get there, and be very pleased with the results. But this readiness to call poetry bad or dull when it is bad or dull, is quite vital to the process of getting there.
Be passionate about something; almost anything; and then good poetry will become entirely practical, and the work of rhythm and rhyme will be worth the effort.