localfreak (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
localfreak) wrote2013-10-07 08:45 pm
localfreak) wrote2013-10-07 08:45 pm
Entry tags:
Poetry
I thought that, since August, I hadn't written any poetry. Or, at least, not any poetry fit to share with anyone ever, only dark half-dressed scribbles in the way that sometimes your brain disconnects and writing might help put the pieces less painfully together. But I've found at least one poem which, whilst unsmiling, is not unusable so that's something. It is poetry group later this week and the Mayor is coming, so I've tried to hammer something out tonight about home.
A friend of mine picked up a poetry book for me, recently. I tried to read it last night but it is absolutely terrible. I mean really, truly terrible. It clunks. I managed to read about six poems, with my pencil in hand making pained scribbles but I think I'm going to have to admit defeat. William McGonagall, eat your heart out, in the age of self-publishing there are some things far worse than your Tay Bridge out there for public consumption. Reading the book had a dual action for me, in the first I think perhaps I have learned something from it - learned to trust ear over all else, learned that really, truly, I can actually identify BAD poetry on occasion, and heard for perhaps the first time in a long time, the awkwardness of the forced rhythm or forced rhyme. I rhyme a lot, it comes to me that way and I like poems generally that rhyme (I like poems that don't rhyme too, also). They please me in their rhythm, balance and bounce and that always made me somewhat concerned when people far more learned than I would lecture about the dangers of the 'forced rhyme' the 'clunky turn of phrase'. I worried that perhaps I forced my rhymes and didn't realise it.
Now that I have read truly abominable forced rhyme, I feel somewhat comforted that I have not, at least not knowingly, pulled some of the trite tricks employed by that writer.
I hope I don't sound like a poetry snob. I try not to be, in fact I often feel far more of a poetry prole (The Waste Land continues to pass me by, unmoved, but Macavity is far more fun), but I promise you it isn't just me, I read a few verses aloud to share the pain and really, tin ear or no, the clunking was very, very present. Even more embarrasingly the author on his blub had commented that the poems 'were written down as they came to [him], barring a few edits for grammar'. The grammar was DREADFUL. There are wayward apostrophes, typos and whole sentences that simply do even less than scan, they make no sense, indeed, some had their sense altered in order to Make The Words Rhyme.
And that rant over I'm dashing now to watch The Dresden Files.
A friend of mine picked up a poetry book for me, recently. I tried to read it last night but it is absolutely terrible. I mean really, truly terrible. It clunks. I managed to read about six poems, with my pencil in hand making pained scribbles but I think I'm going to have to admit defeat. William McGonagall, eat your heart out, in the age of self-publishing there are some things far worse than your Tay Bridge out there for public consumption. Reading the book had a dual action for me, in the first I think perhaps I have learned something from it - learned to trust ear over all else, learned that really, truly, I can actually identify BAD poetry on occasion, and heard for perhaps the first time in a long time, the awkwardness of the forced rhythm or forced rhyme. I rhyme a lot, it comes to me that way and I like poems generally that rhyme (I like poems that don't rhyme too, also). They please me in their rhythm, balance and bounce and that always made me somewhat concerned when people far more learned than I would lecture about the dangers of the 'forced rhyme' the 'clunky turn of phrase'. I worried that perhaps I forced my rhymes and didn't realise it.
Now that I have read truly abominable forced rhyme, I feel somewhat comforted that I have not, at least not knowingly, pulled some of the trite tricks employed by that writer.
I hope I don't sound like a poetry snob. I try not to be, in fact I often feel far more of a poetry prole (The Waste Land continues to pass me by, unmoved, but Macavity is far more fun), but I promise you it isn't just me, I read a few verses aloud to share the pain and really, tin ear or no, the clunking was very, very present. Even more embarrasingly the author on his blub had commented that the poems 'were written down as they came to [him], barring a few edits for grammar'. The grammar was DREADFUL. There are wayward apostrophes, typos and whole sentences that simply do even less than scan, they make no sense, indeed, some had their sense altered in order to Make The Words Rhyme.
And that rant over I'm dashing now to watch The Dresden Files.