ParadoxFry• Show poetry

The whole art of poetry is saying what can't be said

-Alan Watts

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All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

- Oscar Wilde

Bad artists always admire each other’s work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

- Oscar Wilde

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HATING:

- I've found a use for my author info page... ranting. So, I will periodically fill my author page with rants about various things... starting now...

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It’s ‘Abstract’

You know what I mean, it’s a poem that contains lots of flowery language, and great images, and really evocative… but the more you try to puzzle out just what this total poetic GENIUS is talking about… and you twist your tiny mortal mind inside out and strain to make some sense of it… the more you realize that it isn’t actually about anything at all, it’s just totally random words that sounded somewhat interesting when slapped together in this configuration. It doesn’t actually convey a thought, or a feeling, but is simply a random collection of words.

And for a second, you’re fooled… this savant has written something, like a Pollock painting, that doesn’t make any sense, but is beautiful none the less. Wow, with skills like this, I bet the rest of their work is AMAZING….

*click*
Hrm…
*click*
Aaah….
*click*

Waitasec! It’s all bather and drivel, and it’s all the same! It wasn’t a work of genius! It was a million monkeys at a million typewriters with a couple of thesauruses and some LSD, who got lucky once and thought themselves rather clever, so they’d just do it again… and again… and again… and again… and enter their work in contests that have nothing to do with anything, and pat themselves on the back and drink up the comments from the one-time readers either lost in meaningless, or off in ‘abstractville’ and believe themselves to be the next E.E. Cummings… only his work made sense. (usually)

Fool me once, shame on you… fool me twice? I don’t think so.

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Backgrounds

If I see one more corneal rending, radioactive particle shooting, neon-tie-die, skulls, butterflies, skulls and butterflies, or any other kind of background I think I may go blind, and/or inflict grievous bodily harm. You could have written the most amazing piece of poetry the world has ever seen, but I can’t bloody read it, nor do I want to try, because I’m having a brain hemorrhage attempting to decipher what the heck it says! This is a place for poetry, for writing, for words, not some web design competition for colorblind, feces flinging rhesus monkeys. Oh, and if it’s animated… I may be forced to gouge my own eyes out with an exceptionally dull rusty implement recovered from the depths of the New York city sewers.

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Write about my poem, or my inspiring quote!

I don’t understand the litany of contests that ask me to write a poem, and use the contest holder’s poem as inspiration. It’s self serving drivel. If you want people to read your poem, put it on shameless (ironically less shameless than hosting a contest about it), or spend some points on a feature! If I was looking for poetry to read, I have plenty of options. If I am looking in a contest, I want to WRITE poetry. Not to mention the fact that writing a poem about another poem, or a song for that matter, is about as interesting as taking a picture of a picture, or painting a painting. It’s ALREADY poetry, it doesn’t need my help, and I expect that the millions of revisits aren’t going to improve matters, or somehow come up with some spell-binding ‘Mega-Meta-Poem’ that will end the genre.

As for ‘Use this Quote as inspiration’… it’s not a quote if you said it. If it were truly some kind of earth-shattering sky rending observational epiphany, someone ELSE would be quoting it. I especially love it when the quote is spelled incorrectly, or has some egregious grammatical error. It screams: “Look at me! I’m so self important! I’m inspirational! How could anyone not love me and all the wonderful things I say!?” Face facts kid… you’re about as wise and inspirational as a three year old toilet brush in a truck stop bathroom. Nobody thought it was interesting when you said it the first time, nobody found it inspirational when you repeated it, and it’s sure as heck not inspirational now, and further repetitions of the process are not looking promising. If I rolled my eyes any harder, I’d give myself a migraine.

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Centered poerty

I really… really… hate… centered… alignment… I hate it. I think it’s cheap, and it makes your poem look like it was written by a 4 year old on an Apple IIe who only just discovered that her word processor has a ‘centre’ button that magically makes her words appear perfectly centred on the page, and is now doing it for every single ‘I wuv you mommy’ card her dot-matrix printer can produce. It instantaneously devalues any poem that it’s been done to, to the point that I don’t even want to read it. It’s a tawdry and annoying affectation that drives me absolutely bats.

If there is a valuable reason why your piece should be centre justified, it should be immediately and completely apparent to me as the reader. Does it make a shape? Does it convey a feeling of some kind that I can understand? If it doesn’t have some significant purpose WHY IS IT THERE?

You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but I will judge a poem by its alignment.

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