The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #120107   Message #2830832
Posted By: Amos
05-Feb-10 - 02:15 PM
Thread Name: BS: WalkaboutsVerse Anew
Subject: RE: BS: WalkaboutsVerse Anew
David:

Don't get me wrong. The RAW material of having seen so many slices of the world from time to time is not the problem here. The problem is not what you have seen.

The problem is that in translating what you have seen into what you hope will be poetry, you emasculate the event by jamming it through a poor, muggy filter of sentiment and judgemental additives. You then take the product of that filter and pressurize it through another filter of poorly understood aesthetic and linguistic principles on which successful poetry is based. The result of this double pasteurization is contrived, debased, artistically watery and wan, and grammatically jarring.

Good poetry tries to communicate life, and poor poetry tries to transmit a bunch of half-baked sentiments and judgements.

A