Firestarter

Nope. I won't do anything of the sort, and there's no "problem" even now, at least not on my side. If there's one on yours, that's your problem and not mine. I've considered sharing my work privately on occasion, as I probably shall, eventually, with Kibagami, but I'm simply not going to post them on a public message board. And you're going to have to live with that. First of all, I'm not that good; at the moment, my range is limited, and I know it. Second, my work tends to be more honest, more intimate, and more personal than anything any of you have posted. I could possibly show it to one person. Not to several dozen.

Nope. You're just betraying your ignorance by implying that that's Blake's greatest poem, and seemingly judging him on its merits alone, and confusing affectation with reality. In Blake's time, "that olde flowery english bullshit" was the language. There was no other. It usually looks silly when a modern writer uses it, but throwing every 18th century poet in the trashcan because their idiom is strange to you is the mark of a foolish and uneducated mind. Emotion isn't a hallmark of bad poetry. Your lack of discipline is. Find one such line in anything Housman ever wrote. Then come back.

Much agreed. I should have given greater emphasis to the words in boldface below: The talent must be cultivated in turn, of course, just like the skill. Experience is also a huge factor. Get out of the house, do something, feel something, accomplish something; live. You can have all the talent and technical proficiency in the world, but if you haven't done or seen anything worth writing about, your work will still be garbage. Like IDRM said, though, there's no shame in writing garbage, if you admit it. The shame is in writing garbage and pretending, to yourself, others, or both, that it's good. In spouting pompous bullshit like "Your lack of appreciation for my poetry is your own loss!" or "I kick all kinds of ass!" Mmhmm. Sure. However old you are, when you say such things, anyone with an education hears only a snotty little brat bragging about the time machine he built with his Tinkertoys and a rubber band, insisting to Mommy that he really did see dragons flying around where the house is now and if she doesn't believe him it's just too bad! The more you insist that dross is gold, the angrier you get, the more furiously indignant you become, the less I listen.

Kibagami and I are having a PM conversation about poetry, how it should be written, and how to learn to write it. I thought I'd post my remarks here so godthedog can feel all mushy and good about my fucking constructive contributions. As a courtesy, I'm leaving out Kibagami's words, but I'll give you the gist of his question. Y'all are welcome. Now read on; then go, and be better writers. What makes a poem good? If I had to choose one word, it'd be "tightness." Whatever the purpose of the poem and the manner of its execution, you have to adopt Edgar Allan Poe's first principle and make it your own: you have to make every element count. Nothing extraneous. Nothing irrelevant. Every single aspect of the poem must be deliberate; every last facet must be cut and ground and polished until it reflects what you want (and of course that might be a problem in itself). Waste or misuse even one resource available to you, and the final product is flawed at best, garbage at worst. Using language that jars with tone doesn't mean the poem is fine, or merely lessened, even if sense, rhyme, and meter are all perfect. It means your work is crap. You can't have a single discordant note in a symphony. You can't have a single discordant element in a poem. It must be perfect, and when you strike it with a hammer, it must ring true and clear. Even if you're as freewheeling as an ee cummings, you don't quite have the freedom of prose. If you choose a rhyme scheme and an iambic meter, as all beginning poets absolutely must, you have to move through three separate stages - all of them awful and inexcusable. There is no shortcut. The fact that I'm telling you about them before some of you have reached even the first changes nothing. You will move through each one in turn. Accept it. 1) Letting the form dictate your words - this leads to sing-songy crap and it will not be tolerated. The underrated Robert Service accused himself of this fault, saying "Rhyming has my ruin been." He was overcritical of his work, but stuff of this sort is commonly called "verse" rather than "poetry," and you should be prepared for derision if you willingly indulge in it. It requires little talent and less effort, and everyone knows it. 2) Working around the form - this is what happens when you start to acquire a basic understanding of the form, but still know too little to be comfortable with it. You fill up lines with the correct rhymes and the correct syllables, but without substance. The greater part of your poem may be good, but if you're impatient and sloppy, it will show through in the lines that demand hard work. 3) Brutalising the form - this is almost, but not quite, a regression. It happens to everyone. Like a sweet girl who kissed you on the first date, the form has started to give you some of her secrets. Your lack of knowledge, your impatience, and your fear of rejection make you uncomfortable. You transfer those insecurities to the girl or the poem and make yourself feel an artificial contempt for her. Don't fall into this trap. You are the problem, not the poem. Work with the form. You're not better than it is. All those straining things within your heart, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, are unformed, unready, and probably quite cheap. You're not losing anything of genuine value by working with the form. Be patient. Woo her, tease her, see how far you can push her with her consent, adore her honestly for her beauty, and above all, if you want to having a lasting relationship, respect her. Finally, if you have talent, and if you're willing to spend a great deal of time on this sort of thing, you should move on to the fourth and final stage. It's sort of like being "in the zone." Things just make sense; you've acquired an ear for the form, you don't have to count syllables and you know how to play with stresses. You learn to say the things you have to say in something that's almost a different language, but not quite. Its vocabulary is the same but the meanings of words change; the values of articles and prepositions change; the colour and scent of nouns and adjectives change. Imperceptibly, a bit at a time, everything changes. It's like that song from Aspects of Love: "Love can make the summer fly, Or a night seem like a lifetime; Yes love, love changes everything, Now I tremble at your name Nothing in the world will ever be the same. Love, love changes everything, Days are longer, words mean more; Love, love changes everything, Pain is deeper than before... Love makes fools of everyone, All the rules we make are broken Yes love, love changes everything; Live or perish in its flame..." You literally have to be in love with the English language in all its forms to ever reach this point. You have to drink it, breathe it, touch it and know it. Writing poetry is itself a way to make love. You can't just read poetry, or prose, or pieces from a particular era; you must understand instinctively how to create mood, the different connotations of different words for the same thing, the way Latin, Greek, and Saxon roots glow through your letters. You must read to yourself, to others, with others, both aloud and silently; you have to be able to taste words. You have to acquire a sense of history, a sense of depth, and you have to acquire an ear for the music of language, a feel for the conductor's baton of punctuation. It takes a very long time. But the work is its own reward. You will learn, someday, that poetry is not "whut Ah'm feelin'." Poetry is fucking sweat and blood and callouses; it's drunken nights and morning hangovers and cold grey rainy Sunday afternoons; it's tears and fights and make-up sex; it's devotion and betrayal, climax and redemption, and everything in between. It's incredibly difficult. You can't let yourself become cynical and manipulative either; despite the callouses, you have to take joy in the mental exertion, in maintaining the relationship. You have to retain the ability to feel pleasure in writing. It's work, but it isn't a chore. If it ever becomes a chore, stop. If you hate what you're writing, no one will find joy in reading it. Lazy, wannabe amateur hacks like the people in this "poetry" thread have nothing to say, and they spend a lot of time saying it. They just want to bask in approbation; they're not willing to put in the effort it takes to earn it. That's why you get dull, insipid lines like "I will never forget their wonderful sight, my trees" - it's the sentiment itself that's stupid and wasteful; the words just fluff it up and make it worse. It lacks tightness; it's slack and sloppy - the writer just wanted a line, any line, to end the poem, and the reader can see that because it shows through abominably clearly in carelessness and irrelevance. It's disrespectful of your readers, of the language, and your own work. If you don't give a shit about your own goddamn poem, why the hell should your readers? Same applies to the so-called "monologue," that rambling, incoherent, clumsy text cover of Lovefool. That particular "work" could be used as a case study in the dangers of allowing incompetent beginners to work without form. It isn't really prose. It certainly isn't poetry. It's just garbage. Contrary to popular belief, writing a perfect sonnet is the easiest thing in the world. Perfect in every way, too - not just technically perfect, according to rhyme scheme and iambic pentameter, but perfect in sense, perfect in expression, perfect in substance, perfect in tone. Blank verse, such as Milton's Paradise Lost, is a thousand times harder to write. Free verse is a thousand times more difficult still. And that ambiguous expanse between poetry and prose, which Auden reached most brilliantly in The Sea and the Mirror, is a million miles beyond both. In essence, the writer of the "monologue" attempted to build a nuclear reactor before he learned that he shouldn't piss in his shorts. Unsurprisingly, the results were disastrous. You have to learn discipline before you can be trusted with freedom.

9, 10.1, 24 - what precisely do those numbers express? A percentage of the total population, which increased between the dates quoted? A percentage of registered Democrats, which decreased? Either or both, appropriately adjusted? It's meaningless without context.

I didn't feel like making a touchy-feely "contribution." Fuck off.

I like The Dead, yes, but it's not remarkable for its artistry or craftsmanship; it's the characterisations that make it good. Same with Dubliners. Tennessee Williams runs into the same qualification. There's nothing finer than his swift sure outlines of Blanche DuBois and Brick Pollitt, but his plotting, pace, climax, and resolution in almost every play he ever wrote flat-out sucked. Cf Arthur Miller, who had a (marginally) less sure hand in the all-important details of personality, but whose plays proceeded with the sense of inevitability - the feeling that "this could happen no other way" - that marks the best stories.

I was going to give constructive criticism until I saw that. Used up all the goodwill he had from his board name in one stroke, that did. Don't hate on Blake, kids. William Blake was a goddamn genius. The Mental Traveller is almost transcendentally good, on a level with Auden's Lady, Weeping at the Crossroads and Death's Echo. Plus, he's quoted in one of David Gemmell's books, and Gemmell is one of the best writers living - not just scifi/fantasy writers, but writers period.

Nope, you're perfectly within your rights to make that observation. Of course, I subsequently pointed out that I wasn't interested in "helping" any of these people, because their scribblings are so sophomoric as to have little or no potential, so your observation was fairly irrelevant. Still not objecting to you making it, just saying - I'm not helping them improve? So what? You're criticising me for not doing something I never intended to do, never said I would do, and will never have an interest in doing? Well, I think you're a schmuck for not being a nuclear physicist... how's that relevant, you ask? Well, it isn't, which is kind of my point. Irredeemable crap like Ulysses? Very true, but you have to admit that a writer must have the sense right in the first draft. If the concept itself is infantile, whiny, worthless, or all three and more, the execution doesn't matter.

"People just like to fritter time away..." - Jeff Vogel

A friend of mine had to change his yearbook collage because one of the graphics he used was some cartoon strip character saying "Sex machine." He pasted "Party machine" across the top, but badly, so when it was actually printed "Sex" showed through. The admins had a fit, but given that he'd already graduated they couldn't really do anything.

Each senior had half a page. Most people filled up theirs with photo collages; mine was handwritten. Our graduating class had about 22 kids in it, and the entire school from kindergarten to 12th grade was less than 700 people.

I wish. I would've looked hot.

And my point is made. Christ Jesus. Seriously, godthedog, are you SERIOUSLY asking me to try to be "helpful" when I'd have to subject my eyes to this sort of garbage? For the love of God, Montresor - even if you chained me in a vault and walled me up with such excrescences I'd break my own fingers before I condescended to write real "criticism" of this puerile nonsense.

Something ending with "I will never forget their wonderful sight, my trees" isn't worth my time. Nor is a rambling, whiny cross between a Kerouac soliloquy, a pop psych relationships seminar, and a Cardigans song, nor any of the other crap I've seen here. If I had to spend three or four hours correcting basic grammar, there'd be little time left to address creative sterility and artistic myopia. I don't get paid for this. Try to be as helpful and productive as you please, if that's your inclination. Of course, if you're all going to "help" each other, with your tone-deaf ears and your complete lack of anything resembling taste or sense, the revisions will doubtless be as ridiculous and incompetently crafted as the originals. I saw a thread I thought might have potential and I was disappointed. I voiced my opinion. Sue me. PS. Good writing, whether it be poetry or prose, isn't deeply affected by a lack of synonyms. If a writer has to be told "find another word for ____," either his work isn't worth wasting time on in the first place, or your "helpful... qualified" and "productive" criticism isn't worth the pixels that compose it. The other suggestions you offered indicate such fundamental flaws that the entire piece should be scrapped if either is applicable. Stuff your pseudointellectual feel-good writing workshop bullshit in your shoe and shut your mouth.

"You must yourselves realise the power of Athens, and feed your eyes upon her from day to day, till love of her fills your hearts; and then, when all her greatness shall break upon you, you must reflect that it was by courage, sense of duty, and a keen feeling of honour in action that men were enabled to win all this, and that no personal failure in an enterprise could make them consent to deprive their country of their valour, but they laid it at her feet as the most glorious contribution that they could offer. For this offering of their lives made in common by them all they each of them individually received that renown which never grows old, and for a sepulchre, not so much that in which their bones have been deposited, but that noblest of shrines wherein their glory is laid up to be eternally remembered upon every occasion on which deed or story shall call for its commemoration. For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb." JUSTICE - LIBERTY - HONOUR - SERVICE - FAITH - LOVE - DUTY

AE Housman, WH Auden, Seamus Heaney, Anne Sexton, May Sarton, Dorothy Parker, Edna St Vincent Millay, Henry Timrod, and far too many more to name. "There is no holier spot of ground Than where defeated valor lies, By mourning beauty crowned."

If I see any, I'll let 'em know.

Ginsberg, Kerouac et al? I loathe them to a "man." Their citation of Blake as an inspiration once almost turned me off him, and I love Blake. Kenneth Rexroth is about the only one commonly (though not entirely accurately) included among them that I can stand. He was practically the only one who respected and loved language, and he was a real artist with it. Comes through in every line. Ginsberg wasn't worthy to lick his shoes.

Someone with education, taste, talent, accomplishments, and precisely zero need for self-affirmation from a teenager I'll never meet.

Not really.

Dr Rice is not married.

It's only what we've been saying would happen around this time for more than a year now, and what everyone with a clue has known was inevitable all along. Guess that demolishes another Democrat talking point. I wonder what they'll seize on next? Oh yeah, we're soft on terrorists...

Amusing article about Day One.

These are awful. Just like the ones in the last "poetry" thread.