Short Statement on Poetics--#5

[Lightning Rod]

Poetry is risky business.

Poetry on occasion needs to harass and shock and annoy. It needs to take risks.

The poet, like the comedian, often risks offending or insulting the audience, but his duty is to nudge the audience out of it's comfort zone, to provide new perspective on often difficult subjects.

The larger risk is that poetry can be a crashing bore. When poetry becomes a whine-fest or maudlin or full of contrived forms and images or so selfishly subjective that it misses all universality, then it is just boring and indulgent diary writing.

Take your chances.

[mnaz]

I wrote some "protest poems" last year, against the troop surge, against the mercenary nature of our military, against the mindset that our participation in war is inevitable and always honorable by definition-- those sorts of things. I'm not a particularly skilled or disciplined poet-- far from it. I just write it down, arrange it a bit, and if someone calls it a "poem", then great. It can be a balancing act between calling out The Machine (even perhaps with assassin-like contempt at times) vs. some measure of "compassion" for its (unwitting?) victims, and one always runs the risk of "wearing the subject on one's sleeve"...

[hester_prynne]

Says who?
Who made you the definer of poetry?
You?
Oh, okay. Indeed I respect and often agree with your brilliance sir.
Yeah, you've got some good points.
But I like a whining poem once in awhile, and things maudlin too.
Wonder, awe, acceptance, recognition of a being state in lines poetic,
brutality, perceptions, everything under the stars.
Nothing definitive enough to really explain
Tho maybe to judge.........

H

[Lightning Rod]

Says who?
Who made you the definer of poetry?
You?
Oh, okay. Indeed I respect and often agree with your brilliance sir.
Yeah, you've got some good points.
But I like a whining poem once in awhile, and things maudlin too.
Wonder, awe, acceptance, recognition of a being state in lines poetic,
brutality, perceptions, everything under the stars.
Nothing definitive enough to really explain
Tho maybe to judge.........

H

I'm duly disciplined, hest
and I'm hardly the definer of poetry