Speak up!

[rowens]

I think a lot of people assume things based on things they know that others may or may not know about different styles, movements or fashionable periods in poetic thinking and working. I think genre writing, or at least thinking in genre writing, is kind of silly. If people tell you your poems are out of style, or seem to be implying that, that only means it's out of their style. Some people don't know what "modern" or "classical" or any of that means. And their ignorance of these canonical notions might be what some people's poetry strives on; and that's fine if that gets them working. But it really doesn't have anything to do with whether a person can write poetry. A person that's never read anything but Lord Byron can still write something different from Byron that's good, or something that's like Byron and good. But the more sophisticated you get, the more complicated you seem. And the more sophisticated and complicated you seem, the more people expect from you, and the more they push you.

I guess.

People have lots of reasons. Sometimes.