Advice

Poets find it useful to discuss their poems. Sometimes an advice or two would be added. It'd be also useful to have a thread, just this one , which starts with an advice, and then it makes a reference to a poem. This way we will have several advices in one thread. However, let's have only one advice per post, to keep the discussion well focused.

When you're not lazy then it'd be even better to reference at least two different poems in the same post. And of course one can address the same advice in next posts too, even in several other posts--just one advice per post.

I used to post lists with advices but they were just short formulations without any discussion or examples of poems. This time it will be, so-to-speak, more serious.

My advices were roughly of two types. First kind related to the author personally: be a lot outdoors, travel, listen to the music... Here this should not be our topic for this thread. We should discuss poems as such, not the author.

Thus an advice may relate to the language, rhythm, artistic means, ... But also to the, say, political aspects of poems, question of originality, taste, noise level, etc. Potentially, the scope for this thread is huge. And the only limitation is: just one advice per post.

selection

I hope that a number of you will participate, and you may select any poems to illustrate advices, it's up to you. In my case though, I decided to mention poems only of authors from outside of PF&D (unless someone will ask me directly to address their own poem in this thread).

Crispness

A poem should be crisp. Crispness here is the crispness of the author's pen--it's not about the contents of the poem. You may present all kind of things which are not crisp, but the author still should write with a sharp pen.

Needless to say, crispness is vital for the quality of a poem.

I read Election Year by Donald Revell, and this poem, in my opinion, is not crisp at all.

Of course, it is a banal poem, something like: the election is over but I still find new flowers. That's it. Big deal. But this is not important, at least not for this thread. The topic here is crispness.

Instead of going into details (which I may do in another post), I am curious how do you see the issue? Just remember, the issue here is crispness.

logic

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Indeed, when logic is obvious or predictable then you may skip mentioning it. I saw many examples of annoying logic intrusions on PF&D from the past and all the way to today including. But I promised to illustrate these ideas on poems from outside this forum. If I look around too, it will be only too easy.

Ten lines

Here is the Noble prize winner, the pride of English language poetry, and here is the starting 10 verses of the famous collection which was published when the pride of English language poetry was already about 53 years old:



I can list twenty and more poets, and you will never find in their writing anything like this, never. Indeed, this cannot be the pride of English language poetry because these lines are not horrible but worse than that--this verses are a BIG _ n o t h i n g. _ And yes, this is the beginning of "Four Quarters" by T.S.Eliot. Now finally each and every one of you can claim to be a poet.

A quote from wikipedia: