Words On Breaking A Poem

darkmaas said:

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You are only missing the point. No biggie.

I probably like fewer sonnets that you, but that's immaterial. I certainly have a lower tolerance for I probably like fewer sonnets that youI probably like fewer sonnets that you... I reviewed the New Poems for what must be a half century. Also immaterial.

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You stated:

I strongly disagree with that statement.

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twelveoone said:

ok, i can live with it, there was a website -expansive poetry online
a Dr. Salemi who has things there had an essay regarding taking things a little too seriously and wrote a Sonnet that could have fit here, Disney characters. Cleaned up off course. He may have wrote an essay on the about the more extreme neoformalists. This site I like, but I found some others and saw what he meant.

And to think, I once thought something must be wrong with because I don't like sonnets, and now I have you coming out of the closet. I like 5, you like fewer? All that time wasted.

As for bad poetry, bad is a value judgement, as is good. Now, poetry really can't be defined, so this statement is meaningless to me. So you may judge it by a,b,c criteria, I may look at from x,y,z. We both could run up the alphabet and still assign different values. And we would still be missing something. I probably have a higher tolerance for junk if it amuses. Probably have a lower tolerance for good if it doesn't. But them we run into the same problem, we are different. I wasn't around when you where doing NPR, so I am operating in the blind, don't recollect seeing any comments.
So what do you consider good, and why? I want to see what I am missing.

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darkmaas said:

Still missing the point.

We aren't arguing about taste or poeticism. My point is that you should not cobble together a pile of subjective value judgements and attribute them to a collective of people. What you said was that people who write sonnets are likely to "suffer from either a lack of humour, or pissedoffeness; purporting to be the VOICE of reason without thought i.e. they are generally high in the quality of shamabilty ". I know a few sonnetteers and they don't fit that description. Immaterial. What is odd is that you believe your statement to be true when it is patently unprovable. What is annoying is that you would see fit to publish it in a public forum.

I realize that little harm is done. You end up looking a bit shallow to those who might not have seen much of your commentary and a few sonnetteers might have hurt feelings. World Suck increases minutely, but usually nobody dies.

Still, seems a waste of electrons.

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twelveoone said:

still no answer to my questions
and you seem to not to be able to take an overstatement as a joke
what I've seen of your commentary is misrepresentation and focus on minutia

show me the poetry, tell me why it is good

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darkmaas said:

Try this thread post #2591

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champagne1982 said:

I do so love how even then we could discuss "taking umbrage". Mayhap someday it will be time to give it? LOL

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twelveoone said:

So, pain' us a picture - a sky of cerulean blue
From your palette mean and greenish
So, show us what is true

vowels in an uproar

um, I clearly gave you pointers on the other poem

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HarryHill said:

..
Oh no, not that cerulean sky
I'm damn sick of the color as late
Rather make a verdigris lost lake
That I can then imagine instead

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champagne1982 said:

Line Breaks

There are many ways to determine where you should break a line of verse in a poem. In fact, with the adoption of a current trend toward prose poetry, line breaks have become mired in even thicker muck.

With formula poems where rhythm, end rhyme or both are set devices, line breaks are easy, since the choice isn't really up to the poet. How the poet ends the line is still his to determine, but it will always fall after whatever metrical foot required by the form.

Free verse has a multitude of choices all jumbled in amidst the poet's own perception of what they mean or want to say and how they'd like it to sound when they do present their poetry. Line breaking is personal and like poems for the panty drawer, can be as exclusive to their composition as the writer wants them to be.

Sometimes, there's a lack of punctuation in a poem and the line breaks become a form of punctuation in themselves. In effect, signalling the reader to pause here, before your eye moves back and down to the next word. Most often when reading, I like to linger on the end word and then on the verse it's in as a whole. Clever enjambment can trick me into reading on past the break though, so the poet needs to be clear in their thinking about what their devices are doing to their reader.

If there's a significant thought being expressed then should the thought be allowed to continue, unbroken, until the reader goes cross-eyed and becomes breathless? I believe it's up to the poet to find a better way to express the idea, so that no matter if they let the verse run away or if they break after each word, the reader can nod and say, "Yeah, I get that."

When there's a line that hovers over the body of the poem, like a springboard over a pool, the writer needs to examine that verse. He should test it for concise expression of the thought, and if so, then write it to include a logical break earlier in the verse. Don't write it and then look for an important word, it should be composed so that no matter where the break comes, the important word is where you want it to be. Of course, a springboard may be exactly what you want the word to stand on, too. As long as the poet decides and not the verse.

Own your poetry. Don't let the words drive the poet, instead take the wheel and steer the words. Let feelings map your route, but never let them step on the gas once you're out of their neighbourhood. Turn off the GPS sometimes, too. You don't always need to follow that route, or even obey the laws governing a particular county, or formula, as the case may be.

Always do what best serves the poem and you should never need to question why your line break falls where it does in your piece. If you approach breaks with confidence you can always answer critique or questions with, "This poem is exactly how I wanted it to be."

Cut unneccessary adjectives and adverbs from the verse, don't say "tropical sky blue", learn that the shade is called "cerulean". Don't say "cerulean blue" that's redundant since cerulean is already telling the reader "blue". Hopefully, that sort of editing would shrink the line length enough to fit it into the shape of the poem and not leave the reader dangling over the deep end. Get into the pool and confidently swim with the big fish.

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