most poetry is kind of bad

quagmire

and overrated.

isn't it?

pacifier

depends if you like it or not

catefrances

too true.
if i never read another sonnet for the rest of my life, i'd die a happy person.

bluejourneyman

:(

FinsburyParkCarrots

How might one define the necessary qualities of good poetry?

dan_vedder

Ive seen some pretty decent material on this board

FinsburyParkCarrots

This is just one of those hit and run threads. The poster makes a proposition, doesn't back it up, doesn't have the theoretical knoweldge to articulate any concept of poetic aesthetics anyway, and all that happens is that a few gullible people might be lured into spouting their prejudices about what they personally consider good and bad poetry. These people will then say something that annoys another person with different taste in literature, and an ego clash, rather than an intelligent discussion of poetry, will start. That's the way it works, folks, on message boards in general.

The topic question was hardly one for a college assignment. It was designed to spark at least one flame.

There have been some good "What is poetry" threads on here. There's been debate, and some disagreement, but over all, the quality of the discussion was pretty high.

FinsburyParkCarrots

My typing isn't perfect. I meant, of course, "knowledge" in the previous post.

likepilateihaveadog

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

How might one define the necessary qualities of good poetry?

To me, that's kind of the point.

I don't think there have to be any necessary qualities - if it's honest and true, it comes through - whether it's "rehashed" cliche stuff - which can still be good, as long as you feel it - or genius stuff that's pushing new buttons.

Making a list of qualities I think could explain for personal taste, but that's about it.

That's kind of a BS, fence-sitting answer, but....

FinsburyParkCarrots

likepilateihaveadog wrote:

To me, that's kind of the point.

I don't think there have to be any necessary qualities - if it's honest and true, it comes through - whether it's "rehashed" cliche stuff - which can still be good, as long as you feel it - or genius stuff that's pushing new buttons.

Making a list of qualities I think could explain for personal taste, but that's about it.

That's kind of a BS, fence-sitting answer, but....

Light, humourous and nonsense verse aside, I think that I'm looking more for some historical or social awareness in poetry. I'm also looking for technical and expressive competence, but not to the extent that the poem becomes an exercise in formalism. After all, many modernist poets pushed language to the limits of communication, only to keep "high culture" within the realm of a bourgeois or sub-aristocratic elite and beyond the grubby reach of the proles, as they saw it.
Even in poetry of a personal nature, if there's a sense of social context in the work even so much as hinted - it doesn't have to be all over the text - I think it communicates a world of thought to a reader.


As for politically committed poetry, well, so much of it reads like ranting propaganda. There's far too much polemic. I agree with thinkers such as Adorno who applaud writing - it doesn't have to be strictly poetry - that get the balance right between art and politics. But one shouldn't be lured into thinking that a poem about the Lebanon will, because of its social awareness, necessarily be better than a poem about love. The art is how we arrange language to convey contexts of individual and broad social experience.

Just a few thoughts there.

DopeBeastie

i'm sorry y'all but quag's right.
most poetry IS kinda bad, though I wouldn't call it "overrated"

i like specific and nonspecific things about the poems i like, and by nature of origin, MOST poems don't have those things. some do and i love those.

fins, you might think something i like, i overrate... and vice-versa

but it's all good, right?

different strokes?

oh gosh, and if you're in love with someone who writes you a piece of shit... who CARES? you love it, cuz you feel it, and also because you want to love it because you love its author. you take that poem to some guy who wishes you liked him... and he thinks it's an awful piece of shit. take it to someone who doesn't care... and they don't even "get it". so i think... just like all things, it's relative... subjective... all that stuff. a matter of taste.

now, for people who really get into poetry ~ it's different. a poem can suck because of a cliche, or a bad word choice, or metaphorical tossed salad that doesn't flow, or because it's unoriginal, even though technically perfect... it takes a lot to impress someone who's objectivelly looking for originality and "perfection"


anyways... welcome, quag you gonna write something for us?

FinsburyParkCarrots

Sorry, Pasta, I cann't buy the different strokes argument here, because when a person engages in a public forum debating matters of aesthetics, and employs evaluative adjectives such as "bad" and "overrated", they need to qualify your assessment criteria, or facilitate discussion, enabling consensus or debate on that criteria. I see no evidence of anything remotely so thought-out, in the original post.

FinsburyParkCarrots

My typing is horrible in this 102 degree heat. My fingers are welding to the keyboard.

writersu

wow. poetry guidelines..."what makes good poetry?" I think it is like what makes credible outlooks on life and its subtitles that are contained within it (varies by holder).....like these........

experiences that have evolved into either revelations on life that either are unique and new or are those things that many people feel too but aren't obvious. like when we hear songs and say, 'wow, I know THAT feeling!"

experiences that have evolved into scars (hidden or seen) that have turned us into who we are

experiences that when put to paper can elude to many images that we form when we hear it and last but not least; THE NUMBER ONE RULE FOR GOOD POETRY.... (as Letterman would say......)

NO CORNY RHYMING WORDS FOR THE SAKE OF RHYMING!!!!

FinsburyParkCarrots

writersu wrote:

wow. poetry guidelines..."what makes good poetry?" I think it is like what makes credible outlooks on life and its subtitles that are contained within it (varies by holder).....like these........

experiences that have evolved into either revelations on life that either are unique and new or are those things that many people feel too but aren't obvious. like when we hear songs and say, 'wow, I know THAT feeling!"

experiences that have evolved into scars (hidden or seen) that have turned us into who we are

experiences that when put to paper can elude to many images that we form when we hear it and last but not least; THE NUMBER ONE RULE FOR GOOD POETRY.... (as Letterman would say......)

NO CORNY RHYMING WORDS FOR THE SAKE OF RHYMING!!!!

There were two Marxist critics called Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, who in 1974 wrote this essay called "On Literature as an Ideological Form." They were far too sophisticated ever to make the vulgar Marxist statement that literature is a direct replication of a dominant ideology. However, they did consider the relationship between aesthetics and ideology. Is dominant taste about what is good and what is bad, dependent on dominant codes of representing the world through language? If people come to agreement about what is bad poetry, are they using an aesthetic viewpoint that is tied up with how The Man wants you to assess what is worthy and commendable? Perhaps what is bad in poetry is that obsession with formalism or "saying something new". After all, the elite usually have the education and linguistic tools to play with language, and impress their posh publisher friends with it.

Rhyming poetry might well be commonplace, and it will always be fashionable to knock a versifier or poetaster for their use of doggerel. However, I have seen commonplace rhyme used to radical effect in the poems of, say, Patrick Kavanagh. His work, often in using "corny" rhyme, still managed to change our perspectives of issues such as national and personal identity. Compared with Kavanagh, contemporaries such as Kinsella, who was striving against commonplace poetic language towards a high art, seem strangely stilted.

Hooray for poems that use simple verse forms to say something new!

Righteous Jammer

Poetry can be soo raw and emotional, because anyone can write it. If you have feelings and thoughts, put it on paper and see what happens. Sometimes it turns out good, sometimes not soo good~

FinsburyParkCarrots

a poet wrote:

Poetry can be soo raw and emotional, because anyone can write it. If you have feelings and thoughts, put it on paper and see what happens. Sometimes it turns out good, sometimes not soo good~

Yes. Often the process of writing is the main reason why people write poetry in the first place. If people are thinking of the product and a specific audience, they might start pruning it (often to death). But, yes, I agree that the best thing about poetry is the writing of it, regardless of the reading of it. And that creative process is more often good and worthwhile, even if the poem itself doesn't turn out that great.

EvilToasterElf

as an aside, I love how brits refer to it as "the lebanon" - undoubtedly it's correct grammatically, but I get a tickle when I hear it

Political poetry often seems to sever the nerve connection to the brain, it just winds up being lackluster vitriol, and as it tends to rhyme it then becomes lackluster vitriol that the reader - or listener in a slam - can't even take seriously

I rarely tread through the posts on this board anymore, not because I think the poetry is bad most of the time, but because the style I enjoy most, isn't preferred among most of the writers here

I'm beginning to believe less and less in the ultimate freedom of interpretation, for anything, for paint, sculpture, or writing. I think if you hide behind that veil, you haven't really done your job as a writer, you have an abundance of tools at your disposal to take the reader exactly where you want them to go. The freedom of interpretation is then taking your message and figuring out how to apply it to their own life, and experiences.

As this is a music message board I suppose I can apply a bit of musical anecdotal evidence. There is no such thing as a bad form of music, but the music that sounds entirely distasteful at first listen, for some people rap, for some people country, gospel, regae what have you, is most likely because you haven't educated yourself and don't understand the genre. Like most people have never bothered to understand poetry. If you listen to enough of anything, you'll find a piece of it you like, as a general rule, there will always no doubt be exceptions.

The real tragedy is if someone writes poetry, and plays music, without bothering to research and understand the genre they are working in, and their offerings become crude mimicry of perfected styles they've never bothered to look for and their work becomes unremarkable and forgettable as a result.

likepilateihaveadog

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

Yes. Often the process of writing is the main reason why people write poetry in the first place. If people are thinking of the product and a specific audience, they might start pruning it (often to death). But, yes, I agree that the best thing about poetry is the writing of it, regardless of the reading of it. And that creative process is more often good and worthwhile, even if the poem itself doesn't turn out that great.

Well said, thumbs up.

To kind of backtrack to something you said before...I'm reading Bukowski's biography...and it mentions quite often his aversion to writing about politics or current events at all - mainly because he didn't have an opinion on Vietnam.
I mean, he hated the hippies and the peaceniks because the thought they were all just lonely and wanted to band together for something, thinking that if they were in power, they'd be just as bad as Johnson.

So, I don't know if you were saying before that touching on "bigger" or global political issues is something that necessary of a good poet...or poems...but I don't see it as necessary - and very hard to pull it off without seeming polemic.

FinsburyParkCarrots

EvilToasterElf wrote:

The real tragedy is if someone writes poetry, and plays music, without bothering to research and understand the genre they are working in, and their offerings become crude mimicry of perfected styles they've never bothered to look for and their work becomes unremarkable and forgettable as a result.

You had me until this part. I'm not certain that literature can, if it is to say anything new, operate strictly within the formal and ideological confines of genre. For example, critics often criticised "Jane Eyre" as an imperfect example of a novel within the realist genre (because of its Gothic elements). Literary critics over more recent years have employed historical data and feminist theory in suggesting that, because male domestic terror was silenced and never articulated in dominant representations of reality, then women writers had to find non realist ways of expressing it.

Writers adapt genres, and often I do wonder whether a scholarly knowledge of the technical conventions of a genre is necessary in the production of art, since society itself operates to perpetuate narratives of history, community, identity, nation, the home, sexual and gender difference: writers have the social stuff, the crux of the material in their everyday lives to use in their art. It is always handy to go to college and learn form too, and to have that extra grasp of the materials.

But whereas I think, not without admitted arrogance, that one needs to be trained academically to be truly judicious, and knowledgeably theoretical, critic of literature, I think that on the other hand, one doesn't need to go to school at all, to be a great poet. One just needs to live, feel, and use words to subvert dominant ways of seeing self, others, and the big old universe.

writersu

no, not at all. not all rhyming is corny.

hell, I have rhymed many many times in writing......

it's just when people rhyme and can't come up with a word to complete the thought they are trying to put on paper and so they write a word that makes no sense to the rest of it just to have a word that rhymes

FinsburyParkCarrots

likepilateihaveadog wrote:

Well said, thumbs up.

To kind of backtrack to something you said before...I'm reading Bukowski's biography...and it mentions quite often his aversion to writing about politics or current events at all - mainly because he didn't have an opinion on Vietnam.
I mean, he hated the hippies and the peaceniks because the thought they were all just lonely and wanted to band together for something, thinking that if they were in power, they'd be just as bad as Johnson.

So, I don't know if you were saying before that touching on "bigger" or global political issues is something that necessary of a good poet...or poems...but I don't see it as necessary - and very hard to pull it off without seeming polemic.

Umm, I think all art will reflect the politics of its moment of production, whether it's in the material form of a church fresco with posh church paints that display the wealth of the patron in society. Something will give away its politics, intentionally or not. I suppose what I mean is, for me a good poem needn't be about an obviously public or political issue, but it could say an enormous amount about class. I was reading a poem by a South African writer called Chris van Wyk. The poem is called Memory and it is about a childhood trauma. It's largely written in childlike language, too. There's an accident in the homeplace. Now, the topic is very personal but on closer reading, we start noticing descriptions of the house that point to poverty, and the conditions of poor whites (a community often overlooked when people talk of South Africa, its history and politics). The poem becomes a very subtle indictment of class inequality and its effects on real people.

FinsburyParkCarrots

writersu wrote:

no, not at all. not all rhyming is corny.

hell, I have rhymed many many times in writing......

it's just when people rhyme and can't come up with a word to complete the thought they are trying to put on paper and so they write a word that makes no sense to the rest of it just to have a word that rhymes

"Moon"/"June"; "Love"/"Above."


How about "Orange"/"Tetrasporange"? There is such a word.

writersu

[quote

The real tragedy is if someone writes poetry, and plays music, without bothering to research and understand the genre they are working in, and their offerings become crude mimicry of perfected styles they've never bothered to look for and their work becomes unremarkable and forgettable as a result.[/quote]


I can feel things being thrown at me after I say this....but,....

I think the real tragedy is when people start to think that poetry is learned. A lot of other writing is learned....and there is a lot to be said for those who write well and make a living off of it.

But the writing that is used in poetry doesn't need to research other poets in its genre or be educated in a formal setting.
All good poetry needs is a true experience that has been put to words and a poet who can use words to accurately portray his/her feelings.

FinsburyParkCarrots

writersu wrote:

I can feel things being thrown at me after I say this....but,....

I think the real tragedy is when people start to think that poetry is learned. A lot of other writing is learned....and there is a lot to be said for those who write well and make a living off of it.

But the writing that is used in poetry doesn't need to research other poets in its genre or be educated in a formal setting.
All good poetry needs is a true experience that has been put to words and a poet who can use words to accurately portray his/her feelings.

Yup. Or as Kavanagh said (in rhyme),

"And I have a feeling
That through the hole in reason's ceiling
We can fly to knowledge
Without ever going to college".

writersu

Girls go to college to get more knowledge
Boys go to Jupiter to get more Stupider

(I did not really say that........)

FinsburyParkCarrots

Your daughter is a poet and a scholar.

writersu

yes, she is. evidently the apple doesn't fall far from the tree....(as they say....) Who are they?? And why are they always saying stuff???(not an original thought but one worth saying from time to time)

likepilateihaveadog

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

Umm, I think all art will reflect the politics of its moment of production...

Gotcha.
I guess overt would have been the word to use.

DopeBeastie

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

Sorry, Pasta, I cann't buy the different strokes argument here, because when a person engages in a public forum debating matters of aesthetics, and employs evaluative adjectives such as "bad" and "overrated", they need to qualify your assessment criteria, or facilitate discussion, enabling consensus or debate on that criteria. I see no evidence of anything remotely so thought-out, in the original post.

They don't really need to do anything, fins. as evidenced by our dear quagmire's dissinterest in actually having this conversation at all.

lol... so I'll stand

most poetry sucks ass
because it's not good (to me)
OR
it's not about me (imo)
OR
and it wasn't written for me, (that I know of)


lolololololol

FinsburyParkCarrots

PastaNazi wrote:

They don't really need to do anything, fins. as evidenced by our dear quagmire's dissinterest in actually having this conversation at all.

lol... so I'll stand

most poetry sucks ass
because it's not good (to me)
OR
it's not about me (imo)
OR
and it wasn't written for me, (that I know of)


lolololololol

Oh darling Rachey, aka Pasta
There's no earthy alabaster
shinier, more monumental
than your beauty, heaven-sent. All
poesy's nonsense, hardly artsy,
if not offered to Ms Nazi.



Ahem. Can I go now?