Poetry's Gonna Getcha

Maybe when we get so caught up with the rules of good poetry and worry about our punctums, encapsulating lines, metre and conceit so much we lose the heart. The organic, homemade cranberry sauce is just delicious but I can't taste the turkey...

jude

Now that my friend is a bloody good description of what happens when you do get bogged down with too many rules. I'm basically an instintive poet but when I try to obey all the rules I lose my own distinctive voice, sometime it can destroy you. Val

So what can we do to better ourselves?

Is the problem more that we all write about what we see as important, and everyone's definition of important is different?

I tend to use poetry to vent my feelings (I would say spleen, but don't have one anymore!) - no choice - the poems just come. Can't force them to be about what they don't want to be about.

But some crumbs of advice from you, Mistress?

J x

You minx you caught me out there. When all is said and done it's just best to be yourself and as good as you can be. Valx

Which inevitably isn't as good as Ms fishbone...!

Maybe it's a Venus/Mars thing, but I tend to see poetry as a puzzle to be solved. A bit like a Sodoku, except with words. If you get one wrong, the whole thing is buggered.

As an intellectual challenge, I guess it's also like trying to translate concepts into another language.

I'm not keen on raw, unprocessed emotion. Feelings are so ephemeral that it's not worth attempting to catch them. Like buses, there's always another one along in a minute, just as big and red.

I guess it's because we've nothing to say. LOL

I wish some of my feelings would come and go like buses. Perhaps I could encourage one to run over my heart and squash it once and for all, so that it would never do anything so stupid as fall in love with the wrong person.

And if you had nothing to say, Ewan, you would not write anything at all. ;P

Hmmm... Maybe it's an age thing as well, then. There are loads of issues that used to bug me that I don't give a damn about now.

Poetry is w-a-a-a-a-y down my list of Stuff Worth Caring About.

It is the object itself that matters, not the representation of the object.

I grew up with the old adage that 'ninety percent of everything is crap', which has stood me in good stead over the years.

"...ninety percent of everything is crap..."

Where's the 10% in your post?

I couldn't resist.

Ha! U got me. I deserved that for employing the 'wooden spoon' school of argument.

I found it interesting to read in the Guardian recently about Camille Paglia's dismissal of certain highly regarded poets for her collection 'Break, Blow, Burn'.

'Poem after poem, when approached from the perspective of the general audience rather than that of academic criticism, shrank into inconsequence or pretension.'

You can read her fascinating judgments at:

http://www.bu.edu/arion/Paglia16-2.html

p.s. Perhaps we should point Camille in the direction of Eddie Gibbons for a good sports poem!

Her judgements make her sound like a snotty cow. I wanted to pour petrol on her when I read "I could not find a single usable Pound poem—just a monotonous series of showy, pointless, arcane allusions to prior literature." onwards.

After reading that 'Bishop’s poem, for all its virtues, finally seemed too arch or pat for Break, Blow, Burn', I wanted to drop the lit match using copies of her book as tinder. Getting into her obviously superior anthology sounds rather like getting into an oversubscribed exclusive private school.

'F*ck, Fart, Frig' sorry, 'Break, Blow, Burn' won't be on my Christmas list

jude

Well, Paglia's written a very long essay that I've only skimmed but the recurring themes seem to tell us a lot about Paglia and little or nothing about poetry.
As far as I can make out her 'inconsequence' is 'these people have different ideas and interests to me' and her 'pretension' is 'these people write stuff I don't understand'.

Her stuff on Bukowski is bone headed to the point of utter farce. What kind of poetry did she think he wrote? If you're going to write an essay that long slagging people off, I think you need to be a bit more of an expert in your subject. It reminded a bit of Joanna Lumley's hilarious attack on Carol Ann Duffy recently. Although that at least had the benefit of being short and quite funny.

I am not a poet - I gave it up after my teenage angst years and only write prose these days. However I did have the good luck to have Neil Curry as my English master at school. He is now an 'established' English poet of some renown. He told me recently that he had never published a poem which had taken him less than a year to write. He says that it takes him upwards of 100 drafts and countless hours of thought before he is satisfied.

It is, of course, a horses for courses thing and some swiftly written poetry, Jennifer's for example, is truly excellent. It's also true that a lot of poetry is elitist and it is necessary to be very well read to get full value out of it - the trick there is that it should be accessible to all on one level and maybe deeper on another. If it is unintelligible to 99.5% of the population then it is only good for very few people and therefore, in the grand scheme of things, not very good at all.

I find Eliot magnificent and I love Pound whereas I find Plath and Hughes very difficult, although I do appreciate that they have their good points. It's what speaks to you on the day that matters.

However I do find a lot of poetry on here spells it out far too much - not enough is left to the imagination, to the ongoing thought process that is begun by the words or to the subtle counter punch.

Indeed, John Dugdale's snippet in the Guardian about Camille P says that she is renowned for her 'verbal vendettas'...and concludes that 'perhaps she and VS Naipaul who finds equally little that pleases him in 20th century fiction, should join forces'.

It is incredible to be so utterley confident as to dismiss poets such as Pound, Auden et al with apparent lack of humility.

But she topped the best sellers with the book..?

However, the requirement for 'perfection' in a poem is to miss the point. Poetry is a human endeavour to communicate, and will inevitably have limitations, and responses will always be subjective up to a point, according to an individual's values and experiences. Poems live for posterity for a variety of reasons, not always because they are perfectly crafted and unerring in their symbolic/metaphoric integrity.
They are so hard to attach value to.

As for TC - Eliot is still my favourite. I go back to him all the time.

She topped bestsellers? Blimey! Smug-tittery was obviously in fashion that season along with marble kitchen worktops and Reiki. When I said getting into her book sounded like getting into an oversubscribed exclusive private school, I meant it sounds like it has precious little do with talent and more to do with prejudice and preference.

I completely echo Bukh's sentiments and yours Emma. I'm a big fan of Ezra Pound and TS Eliot! I shall continue to enjoy the arch, pat, inconsequential, pretensious, dated, perilously top-heavy, garrulous, meandering, dispiritingly dead end, grimly ideological and message-driven, venting, florid, pseudo-philosophical, precious, grandiloquent, pedantic, preoccupied, mawkishly pious, sadly self-limiting poems that she derides with such gusto!

jude

Heavens, thank you, Tony.

Yes, editing is not my forte - when I do try it, I end up editing out everything that was any good about the writing in the first place! And end up with pretentious overworked claptrap!

100 days! For ONE poem? My mind boggles... esp since I have just written 54,500 words for NanNoWriMo in 30 days....without a single edit apart from a spellcheck every now and then...