SERIOUS POETRY

Serious poetry


This is something I am interested in, and plenty of other members of the Soup also share my concern. For example Debbie says every time she takes a stance on serious poetry someone says they are sick of all this serious stuff, and let’s write something stupid for a change. Trouble is, in my view, there are already enough stupid poems to fill a bathtub. There are many good poets writing on our electro-pages, especially about ten or twenty whom everyone recognizes as being outstandingly excellent. And there is an awful lot of good poetry on the Soup. But there is also a lot of bad stuff……God knows I’ve written some dreadful drivel myself.

We surely must all agree that poetry needs a poetic vehicle, otherwise we are writing doggerel. So why do writers insist that they “do not know’ the form of their work. It’s like entering the Olympics, but not knowing what event you are in - high jump or discus or swimming? How can anyone judge such an entrant? Just put your work down as free verse and we may be able to see what you intended.

Apart from not knowing the form of a poem, it bugs the hell out of me when I see

( a) Bad spelling where good spelling is intended. Oh sure, sometimes a poem deals in a humorous way with bad spelling, or maybe uses “errors” as puns, etc. But where the poet obviously sets out to be well-spelled, and clearly fails, this is unacceptable.   Holy mackerel ! Ever heard of Spellcheck?

( b) Sloppy grammar where good grammar is intended….if you’re not sure, check your stuff with a textbook on grammar or ask someone who knows grammar

( c ) Non-rhyme where rhyme is intended……”flea” rhymes with “sea” and “see”, but obviously not with “idea”. If you can’t rhyme properly, then don’t use rhyme. Try using Soup’s rhyme facility

( d ) Poetry which looks like this


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
    He

            Wants              an


I
C
E
C
R
E
A
M
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


Oh sure, people can argue all day long about why the word “icecream” is capitalized and vertical; or the deeper meaning of why the word “wants” has an initial capital, whereas the word “an” has none. And so on. To me, it resembles the situation in art galleries where an exhibit is simply a canvas with black paint slopped on and ridden over with a bicycle tyre, or another exhibit is just a green line drawn horizontally across an old newspaper. I’m sorry but I call a spade a spade, and this is nonsense, pretentious nonsense. It simply is not poetry. Perhaps for such poems we should have another poetry category below “I do not know” - there should be a category of “Garbage”


That’s my ten cents.