 Journal: POETRY
-------------------------------------------Mood: The UsualYesterday after I am sure more than a year I decided to look at the Elite Sklls website again and to comment on a poem. Things haven't changed much. Most of the poetry is in my opinion so much drivel. But that is as you say your opinion, I hear people say, and we beg to differ. We think our poetry is good, so there! Why, some people might ask, do you think your opinion matters more than that of others? Well, I'm certainly older than most, you will grant me that, and perhaps with age does come wisdom. I do have a degree in English Language and Literature and a diploma in Linguistics, but we don't write that old stuff, I hear you say. We are young and we make the rules. Nevertheless, please allow me to explain why I think so much of the poetry on this website is drivel.
Firstly, there have always been the reasons why people write poetry, sometimes to express love and sometimes to express grief. Hormonally driven poetry however temporarily blinds the poet. Of course it is a nice feeling to be in love and of course it is an agonizing feeling to be jilted, but there is nothing unique about those experiences. They are if you like the common human condition. If you feel inspired to turn those emotions into words, sure this will act as akind of catharsis for you, but it doesn't make poetry. What it does make is an emotional diary, a record of your feelings which should be kept ina bottom drawer and never offered up for publication. Those emotions and those words are for you, not for an audience. If our audience is not sharing the same emotions, your efforts will be construed as teenage angst, platitudes, clichés, unoriginal and boring. So what can a writer do to turn this sort of stuff into acceptale poetry? What he or she has to do is realize that the major component of any poem is not the emotion that inspired it, but the language that it is written in. Here there are many traps for the unwary. Many think that they have to use an elevated form of English to make their mundane ideas more poetic. These tend to be the longer, multi-syllabled words of Latin origin, adoration instead of love, tempestuous instead of stormy, pulchritude instead of beauty etc. ad infinitum. A preponderance of such words tends to give a piece of writing the tone of a sermon rather than the tone of a poem. My first pice of advice to a budding poet would be to deliberately choose the shortest alternatives whenever you are faced with a word choice. Secondly, the aspiring poet will have come across poetic techniques such as rhyme or alliteration and thinks to improve his or her poetry by using such devices. My advice is, not to be afraid of any such technique, but to use each and every one of them with caution. Rhyme is good, alliteration is good, similes are good, metaphors are good, but only when their use is secondary to the meaning of the poem. In other words, never use rhyme for rhyme's sake nor alliteration for alliteration's sake. If a rhyme or alliteration happily pops up, then by all means use it, but never ever strive to find a word that has to rhyme with a previous one because of your chosen rhyme scheme. The best piece of advice I was ever given was that every single word in a poem must earn its right to be there. The word must mean exactly what you want it to mean and the word must sound exactly right in the context of the surrounding words. This sounding right could be because it alliterates, assonates or rhymes or more probably because it is fitting in with the rhythm of the line.
In order to find the precise words you need, you have to be prepared to revise, revise and then further revise your poem. Change words, change word order and be prepared to remove whole lines. Generally the shorter the better. A poem could have a particular metre, but it must have at the very least a pleasantly flowing rhythm. A line should not sound awkward. Just read it out aloud to yourself and let your instincts guide you. As a very rough guide each line should have approximately the same number of syllables. If you are really keen on becominga better poet, just remember that it is a skill that can be learnt and that can be practised. Read lots of poetry by well-recognized poets. Then try imitating certain styles. Forget for a moment that you feel divinely inspired by God or your sex drive to write poems about how wonderful or awful it is to be you and try something more objective. Write about other people, write about nature, write about landscapes, write about anything where you can be objective and where your poetry is driven by the desire to write good poetry and not the desire to express your emotions....Created 2012-10-21 20:43:40 |
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