Don't Settle

[Todd]

I've read and enjoyed the thread on how to know if your poetry sucks.

http://pigpenpoetry.com/Thread-For-Begin...etry-Sucks

I started thinking about other things that cause poems to suck. At all levels of experience, I think a lot of poems suck when poets settle for the good and the easy instead of the best. When we settle for the first word, or the first image. The poem often becomes boring, predictable, and even cliche. Before finishing a poem, it's important to stop and ask ourselves is it boring, is it easy...does it suck?

And then change it.

Thoughts?

[Leanne]

I don't believe a good poet is ever comfortable. That's why I post here -- to make sure I'm not getting too complacent.

[Todd]

It is good to push one another to produce better work. Complacency gets very easy when people just assume you're a genius. Thankfully, we don't think that highly of each other here.

[rowens]

Despite it all, I'm more interested in people and atmosphere than words. The philosophy, psychology and sometimes even religion of a poem or story or whatever. I'm more interested in a body of work than individual poems. In what a man or woman, or sometimes man-woman, or thing, is saying about things. As far as style and form and good and bad art come into that, I'm interested. Plenty people know how to make that call. It seems that many poems are good because other people say they are, even though I don't think so, and so I have to say "Well, that's what good can look like."

Most of the time I settle to have my poems feel to me like extensions of myself and other people and things I know of. So they're usually crude, awkward and bent; even if I spend weeks making them that way. And considering that a lot of my stories are about the mundane, everyday lives of mutants and abominations, I think that it makes sense philosophically.

But I never feel settled, I always feel them gnawing at me for various reasons.

But I'm sure nobody's interested in my bastard accounts of style and technique.

[Stalker]

I was thinking, today and recently, that I only write the same poem again and again and again.

they look different but infact they are the same, and the same symbols crop up, because the poems are me, and I have the same symbols.

I was considering another thread that I saw here about editing, I am not keen on editing, I simply write the same, unrecogniseable except to me perhaps, poem.

And one day I will publish a body of work that will be 47 versions, perhaps I will call it evolution.

and this is normal I think actually.

settle? ooh no mrs. Is there a final version that will be the distallation of myself on a page? Will there be spiders? I am almost certain it will have a confusion of senses, a tongue that will not be tamed and that I will be unhappy with it.


Well unless the final miracle arrives and I discover that I am infact perfect.

Despite it all, I'm more interested in people and atmosphere than words. The philosophy, psychology and sometimes even religion of a poem or story or whatever. I'm more interested in a body of work than individual poems. In what a man or woman, or sometimes man-woman, or thing, is saying about things. As far as style and form and good and bad art come into that, I'm interested. Plenty people know how to make that call. It seems that many poems are good because other people say they are, even though I don't think so, and so I have to say "Well, that's what good can look like."

Most of the time I settle to have my poems feel to me like extensions of myself and other people and things I know of. So they're usually crude, awkward and bent; even if I spend weeks making them that way. And considering that a lot of my stories are about the mundane, everyday lives of mutants and abominations, I think that it makes sense philosophically.

But I never feel settled, I always feel them gnawing at me for various reasons.

But I'm sure nobody's interested in my bastard accounts of style and technique.

[billy]

It seems that many poems are good because other people say they are, even though I don't think so, and so I have to say "Well, that's what good can look like."

But I'm sure nobody's interested in my bastard accounts of style and technique.

isn't that true of all art, many are unknown till some says..."how simply wonderbar" for me that's what makes art including poetry interesting, i'm allowed to like or dislike something despite how everyone else feels.

intersted, yes, undstand what you mean or say, not always, i'm not that into poetry o feelings of stuff. i'm just a common as muck arsehole who likes poetry. you're a definite asset to the site though.

---

anyway, how do i know if my poetry sucks...i expect honest feedback that says, it works or it doesn't. in general i start off with the attitude that my stuff sucks, i love it when more than two or three say a poem doesn't suck. it doesn't happen that often but when it does the feeling is all the better.