Hi there has been about a month since I stopped posting, I have - TopicsExpress

Hi there has been about a month since I stopped posting, I have been more of a watchman. I got some recommendations for everyone: In replies to the multitude of Poetry can be anything! Someones trash is someone elses treasure! You cant judge poetry, man! Youre wrong. And because I care about both this group and having a job that prevents me from dedicating much time, I want to explain to you why youre wrong. 1.) Think of a poem as having a thesis line. This thesis line could be an observation you made that stimulates a question. You dont even have to have an answer to that question, but youre trying to get your thesis across like a paper. This could be, Indecision has ruined my life, or, my mothers drinking has not only distanced herself from my sister so much that all they share at this point is their now mutual love for drinking, a trait my sister most likely picked up to be like our mother. So now you have your thesis idea. What sparks your poem. And observations are fine, too, about nature or the history behind an old barn. Ted Kooser is great for this. 2.) Now you have a thesis. Great. Time to convey it and make that reader feel what you feel. Uh oh. Theres the problem. In fact, its become a harder problem, because the average person is assaulted with hundreds of television shows, advertisements, facebook posts, memes, pictures of words written on signs slathered on their social network sites, all competing for that persons emotion. Damn. And most of these have music and moving images trying to get through their hardening exterior. So how do you do it with your poem? This is where the craft of poetry comes in. You need to make something efficient and powerful. You have to build an engine under the hood of your poem and piece it together. If I come out and say, Im sad, you left me, now Im mad. Thats not going to go very far. Also, it doesnt get my thesis across, because Im not specifying who left me, or what kind of sadness Im feeling, or why its turned to anger. While sometimes the who isnt important, we need a fresh way to explain the feeling. BUT if I just up and tell you, youre not going to feel it as strongly. 3.) IN poetry, youre trying to explain something beyond the words themselves. Poetry has so much more focus on it due to its size than prose. Its language distilled. And you dont see it until you start /analyzing/ professional poetry and have a professional explain to you whats going on in the poem that the poet intended to happen. Line breaks arent just random snaps of line for the sake of lining up rhyme. Syntax, the length of a line, all are chosen to have a certain velocity. Lets analyze something short and sweet. Were going to do W.S. Merwins Separation. Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color. So how much is there to talk about here? Well, lets just touch on a couple of choices Merwin has made. First, he chooses a tercet (three-line stanza). Three line stanzas usually come off as evocative and self-contained. If they appear on after another, they can seem uncomfortable (which can work to the writers advantage). Haiku, for an example, has been made a tercet in the west. So for a short poem, a tercet works extremely well. The big feature, however, of Merwins Separation is the contrast of absence going through the narrator. Thats a big deal. Absence is almost always seen as a hole or an emptiness. Yet the narrator has been filled by it. How do we know the narrator isnt being stabbed through by something hollow? Because the comparison of whats moving through him is as thread through a needle. Its solid. Its tangible. It makes the absence real. The self-contained last line (as the previous two lines are a single sentence) has a lot of strength to it, as it gets the second point of the thesis across: everything the narrator does has some element of that absence showing in it. Thats a big topic, and Merwin gets it across in three lines. Three frickin lines. But, wait, theres more. Stitching is an act of construction and creation. So that absence isnt shown in just a superficial color. Its stitched, meaning it goes into the actions themselves, deeper down beyond the revealed color we can see. Finally, consider the title to the poem. Its Separation, not absence, which is the emotion hes feeling. This is something more permanent, more forced against the narrators will. While it doesnt give us a complete view of the circumstances of the absence, it gives us an idea that it was forced upon the narrator, and possibly the you. Let me make for you this poem as most likely seen on this group: Absence I feel your absence like an empty cart like a hole in my heart it hurts when I do anything without you. This is a bad poem. Cart and heart have nothing to do with one another. It fails to extend the metaphor, its obvious that theyre made to force the rhyme, a now overbearing element to the poem. Hole in my heart is a cliche. It doesnt have any punch like fresh imagery does. And what better way to end this crap-fest than being told about an abstract emotion like pain. Were not surprised. Were not taken anywhere. This is a bad poem. Merwins poem sounds like its written by a Poet Laureate (and that poem isnt even close to some of his more masterful work). There is a massive difference between good and bad poetry. Good poetry has so much more going for it in depth. You can analyze it all day and see the elements of it all working together. Or could never go into those elements, read the poem, and still walk out surprised at how it made you feel and never know why.Thats good poetry. Summary: Stop treating poetry like an arts and crafts project. Its not. Its a real art form. When you say that it can be anything and be good insults the last 2,000 years of effort by poets across the world. Spamming the mods: Nayan P. Sindhuliya Ujjwala Maharjan Sanket Shrestha Pranab Singh Suvani Singh Yukta Bajracharya.