I wrote this a while back, on another site -- a few things I've seen recently have reminded me of it:

Is poetry dead? Who cares? How many times have we had this discussion? No, it's not dead, you cry. There's more poetry being written now than there ever was. Look around you. The internet is a marvel of communication. Poets, poets everywhere and something about slimy things.

Blah. Poetry didn't go through an amazing resurgence with the coming of the internet; what surged was people's ability to get in other people's faces without ever having to properly commit to any kind of relationship. This nice safe little interface created a haven for the imagination, but there was a problem: imaginations just aren't what they used to be. As a consequence of two or three generations of being told precisely what to think, how to act, who to vote for and so forth etc ad infinitum, "creativity" has come to mean "see what else is around that you like and think you can manage, then copy it". The personal diary became the public blog, and poetry in the key of I was soon de rigueur.

I recently tried an experiment with a group of poets who professed to be -- as they always do -- interested in learning. For discussion I posted a couple of very well known "classic" poems, the first being Blake's A Poison Tree. If you're not familiar with it, google it. It's a poem with fairly straightforward metaphors, written in such a way that it should provoke quite a lot of philosophical discussion and speculation. Instead the prevalent responses were something along the lines of "Blake is bad, why would he do such a thing?" and "how can an apple kill someone?" Before you shake your head, consider why these are not stupid responses but the result of conditioning. Let's first look at the I in poetry. Once a narrative device that we'd have had no trouble separating from the writer him/herself (do we really think Huck Finn wrote his own story?), it's become the only perspective that seems to matter in poetry and must be true. The I can't lie. And, it seems, the I most especially cannot be tangled up with metaphor. How can one thing be another thing? That's just not authentic. Authenticity means, it seems, a stream of emotional responses to life changing events with arbitrary line breaks to make it look like a poem should. God forbid we should lie in our poetry, we're so very honest in every other aspect of our lives after all.

The internet brought not a resurgence, but an unholy resurrection. We have zombie poets who feed on validation, which is just as well since brains are in disturbingly short supply.

I feel that when I think about things really hard for a long time, and then express what I feel, people tend to laugh at me, or get pissed off at me. When I write a poem, nobody will read it, unless I post it online. But posting it online does little for me, since I somewhat hate the Internet. Really the Internet makes me feel uncomfortable. But it's better than people telling me that they don't have time to waste reading things I've made. This is the first year I've ever tried posting poems online.

(11-25-2012, 08:15 AM)Leanne Wrote:  I wrote this a while back, on another site -- a few things I've seen recently have reminded me of it:

Is poetry dead? Who cares? How many times have we had this discussion? No, it's not dead, you cry. There's more poetry being written now than there ever was. Look around you. The internet is a marvel of communication. Poets, poets everywhere and something about slimy things.

Blah. Poetry didn't go through an amazing resurgence with the coming of the internet; what surged was people's ability to get in other people's faces without ever having to properly commit to any kind of relationship. This nice safe little interface created a haven for the imagination, but there was a problem: imaginations just aren't what they used to be. As a consequence of two or three generations of being told precisely what to think, how to act, who to vote for and so forth etc ad infinitum, "creativity" has come to mean "see what else is around that you like and think you can manage, then copy it". The personal diary became the public blog, and poetry in the key of I was soon de rigueur.

I recently tried an experiment with a group of poets who professed to be -- as they always do -- interested in learning. For discussion I posted a couple of very well known "classic" poems, the first being Blake's A Poison Tree. If you're not familiar with it, google it. It's a poem with fairly straightforward metaphors, written in such a way that it should provoke quite a lot of philosophical discussion and speculation. Instead the prevalent responses were something along the lines of "Blake is bad, why would he do such a thing?" and "how can an apple kill someone?" Before you shake your head, consider why these are not stupid responses but the result of conditioning. Let's first look at the I in poetry. Once a narrative device that we'd have had no trouble separating from the writer him/herself (do we really think Huck Finn wrote his own story?), it's become the only perspective that seems to matter in poetry and must be true. The I can't lie. And, it seems, the I most especially cannot be tangled up with metaphor. How can one thing be another thing? That's just not authentic. Authenticity means, it seems, a stream of emotional responses to life changing events with arbitrary line breaks to make it look like a poem should. God forbid we should lie in our poetry, we're so very honest in every other aspect of our lives after all.

The internet brought not a resurgence, but an unholy resurrection. We have zombie poets who feed on validation, which is just as well since brains are in disturbingly short supply.

some good points. many like myself came to poetry with no grounding of it. when i read a poem i thought a the poem was about them or;
b they were lying . it turns out that's not always the case, and omce we understand that the better we are at being equipped in giving some kind of sensible feedback. it's the same for those who do genuinely write about themselves..they shouldn't expect us to accept their reality as much as they should expect us to enjoy it. once we start with the "i can't respond because it seems like "a' truth" we're fucked.
i don't know about resurgence or not but the net did make it more accessible. sadly it works the way a sharp stick works, give everyone a sharp stick and people are gonna start losing eyes

---

(11-25-2012, 08:49 AM)rowens Wrote:  I feel that when I think about things really hard for a long time, and then express what I feel, people tend to laugh at me, or get pissed off at me. When I write a poem, nobody will read it, unless I post it online. But posting it online does little for me, since I somewhat hate the Internet. Really the Internet makes me feel uncomfortable. But it's better than people telling me that they don't have time to waste reading things I've made. This is the first year I've ever tried posting poems online.

i get the feeling (and i may be wrong) you're worrying too much what others think and say. as for the net making you feel the way it does, that's more of a personal problem that only you can deal with. so far you seem to be doing okay.

The thing with the Internet is that it's too impersonal. But when people are my family or my friends, and they are right there, and I want to share something with them, and they refuse to even look at it, or take it seriously, I feel I'm wasting my time talking to them about it, but the emotions, if not the content, of the poems come from them. So it's troubling.

"As a consequence of two or three generations of being told precisely what to think, how to act, who to vote for and so forth etc ad infinitum..."

This is true. But when you don't have anyone that agrees with you that you can intimately discuss these things with, that you can spend time with. And when you try to question these things with people that you know and have feelings for, they attack you and tell you you're stupid, and cut off all contact with you, and go vote for George Bush or start snorting prescription drugs every day and night, you start to crack up inside from frustration and loss.

---

Poetry is way of showing things. Whether the "I" is you or another "I" you're using. As for me, I don't much care if people love or hate my poems. What I care about is how people use poetry to react to the world. Which seems to be somewhat what you're saying about being conditioned by popular opinion and practice. How many usually react to poetry or anything that makes them think is, "Go away. That's boring and too much trouble to deal with." And though I keep trying to talk about the importance of poetry, what it can do, and how many ways poetry can be expressed, I keep feeling that people are arguing against me for trying to enforce the importance of MY poetry.

---

And I mean here, lately. That many of the responses here are accusing me of talking only about MY poetry, when I'm talking about all poetry.

my whole life is one of people not agreeing with me or liking what i did. as for it being impersonal i totally agree, though there are exceptions. (i met my partner on line and we;ve been together for ten years now it's as impersonal as we allow it to be. even my girls called me a puff when they saw my poetry, it's the kind of animals we have in our family, but that's cool, i call them sluts

Blackadder to Baldrick What do you think of Percy's rough?
B: I think he looks like a bird who's swallowed a plate my Lord.
BA: No that's what I think, that's what I think! What do you think?
Try to have a thought of your own, Baldrick, thinking is so
important. What do you think?
B: I think thinking is so important my Lord.

It is un-PC to think for yourself .....you're not qualified


i don't know about resurgence or not but the net did make it more accessible. sadly it works the way a sharp stick works, give everyone a sharp stick and people are gonna start losing eyes

---

A think you'll find that in a recent survey the incident of people with a "badie eye" has significantly dropped.

in general zombie poetry is far more prevalent. everyone and their dead cousins thinks because they string 4 lines of shite together they're poets. what irks is that an army of flesh eating followers who ooze out the same stuff agrees with them. because bad poetry is more prevalent than goo poetry (on the net) that's the shite most think should be emulated) they all start feasting on each other shite and pretty soon good poetry is buried under the walking corpses of self proclaimed poets. its as if calling oneself a poets makes it so. there's a lot of evil out their pretending to be poets and writing pretend poems in order to trap the unwary. i think the problem is, that back in the day, people could steal other peoples poetry and pass it off as their own, with the newt it's a lot harder to get away with. hence all the great shite poetry that wash down the river of the internet.

I feel that this whole issue is one that pervades all of society (I can't really comment outside of the UK)...but I suspect it exists as a world wide problem. This is an almost constant subject of contention (against society) in our family. My daughter going through college was told to re-do a piece of work 4x because it didn’t make the grade.. She got more and more distressed and did more and more pages of work...researching in the library late into the nights. In the end she asked a fellow student if she could look at her "merit" pass piece of work...She showed her half a page of work where basically she had cut n pasted the hand out sheet and inserted the key words from the lecture. In the end, it was that one word was missing from her report and when she finally substituted this word into her text she was given a pass only for her 6 page report,...the reason....,it's not appropriate to do research at your age so I've marked you down. Kids in the UK (for two generations now) have been brought up with cameras in the playgrounds and corridors and "we will tell you what to think, because you're not qualified" education. Then on top of this we have a barbed wire PC thinking that says something like this:-
(I'm sure plenty will disagree with this view )
• Every one should conform and be the same – the same rule applies for all.
• We should defend the right of the individual to express themselves and be allowed to do what is good for them.
• Therefore, everything is acceptable and everyone should conform too and embrace everything.
However….
• If you do not accept this rule. For example if you do not subscribe to homosexual practice, being anti blood sports, agree to abortion, etc. etc.....if you don't tow the publicly held (PC) party line, (the new and approved one), then we the public, your neighbour, your peers, have a right to judge you and to oppress you and persecute you.
Dragging this back to our thread, I think that what we see in our frustration of the appearance of zombie poets is simply a symptom of what is happening in wider society. Poets (true poets that is...if such a thing is properly named) are people who have already got out of the PC box....poetry is defiantly not normal according to society (as has been discussed previously). Poets look askance at their society and the world and have been known to parody and criticize the perfect utopia that our respective governments have provided. I'm not in favour of war if it can at all be avoided, but revolutions (and for me as a Christian) martyrs are what historically have been the path to live in the freedoms that everyone so likes to boast about in the "civilised world",...I suspect that a great many of said revolutionaries and martyrs were poets.
Back at the zombies knocking at our door....we just need to be more evangelistic in our outlook and do a better job of polluting them to some out of the box thoughts.

---

"Then on top of this we have a barbed wire PC thinking that says something like this:-
(I'm sure plenty will disagree with this view)"

It's obvious that plenty will disagree, as you say. So when you say something, and the argument is "that's only your opinion": while that's true, it's also true that people are going to act on their opinions if the opinions actually mean anything to them. People are going to go out and do things that might very well end up affecting many others in direct and indirect ways. Online, I've seen how people argue over topics only for the sake of venting anger or showing off. And it's the same with political news interviews and things like that. And one big reason for this is that if you actually cut through the shit and and take serious action, somebody will kill you or lock you up. Online and on TV and radio, people can play-act at being radical all day; it all blends in with entertainment, and it's just a show like pro wrestling.

---

"(and for me as a Christian)"

Anti-Christians, and Churches and people like Saint Paul, they take what we have of the story and teachings of Jesus (regardless of what you believe about the Gospels) and they spin it all around, and make it accessible for the very society Jesus said led to all the hell fire/gnashing of teeth stuff.

The very people that control and influence Jesus' teachings for us are opponents of those teachings. And we know that's part of this "conditioning"; the teachings of Jesus take the Old Testament, and say cut through the shit to the heart of humanity... and then they build a New Testament around the heart of those teachings using a bunch of the same old shit.

I'll give one more of my dreaded opinions on the matter, here. This is one of my opinions that people have told me is the most crazy.

The human race thrives on conflict and war. The genius of the teachings of Jesus is to wage war against war. Nonresistance to evil, nonrestistance to violence, to the point of death. The death of Christ is Symbolic. With the death of the physical "world" the energy of life becomes the Holy Spirit. Physical war gives way to spiritual war. Symbolical war of minds and "souls". Many that follow Jesus' teachings will be killed or left to die by those that don't follow the teachings, but all will die any way. Those that remain in a society of physical war and greed and so forth will continue to suffer the hell fire and torments of that lifestyle. But if all followed the basic heart of the teachings, and lived and fought spiritually/symbolically, while helping and giving and sacrificing for the sake of others physically: that is the Kingdom of Heaven.

It's not likely that will ever come about. Especially when most of the believers of the teachings don't really follow the teachings. Most of us don't want peace and Heaven. We think we would like peace, and when we're in great suffering we sometimes want peace, in certain senses. But I'll stop here.

it's going too far off topic. start a discussion in the general forum if need be,

I guess for me the key question to put forward for myself and directed at anyone running a poetry site is: Is this (the appearance of zombie poets), a problem that we need to manage or deal with and if so...How do we manage or deal with the problem?
I made the suggestion above that it was a wider problem for society (well in my experiance in the UK) and put forward the slightly tounge in cheek suggestion that we should be more effective in polluting them (and I used the word polluting with an intent at humor) with the ability to start thinking for themselves.
As Billy has pointed out it is possible to have deep and meaningful discussion / relationship building via the internet, so Im asking does anyone else think it is appropriate to think of the forum more in terms of helping others to aquire this skill (along with poetry skills)?

Short answer, AJ: YES!

That's partly why we're so big on feedback -- reading poetry is a really good way to improve your critical literacy skills and those are skills that can be adapted to almost every other area of life. The same methods of decoding can and should be used to critically evaluate everything we read -- but of course that would totally screw up the media and the advertising world, which as we all know runs just about everything in the universe

It absolutely IS a wider problem for society (the popularity of reality TV shows us that). A discerning populace is not what governments and corporations desire. Keep 'em dumb, throw 'em crumbs and watch them beg for more.

i'll be totally frank. only in as much as it helps them in respect to poetry and how best to take part in this site. the good thing with that is it can help them do the same else where. other than that my endeavours at helping others are pretty much family and friends based, and even then only close friends. i'll go out of my way to engage non poets on the site and would whenever possible help them if it were possible. in general, while we have our moments most zombie poets shrivel up after a short stay at a site like this. i'm not sure if that's good or bad but it's been my experience. we get lots of hopefuls but find that's all they were, hopefuls. then we get an odd keeper who isn't or doesn't want to a zombie.
i see this place as a meeting place in general and a site for poets in the main. i'd let every poet go before i'd lose sj. while the site is for poets, some things are more valuable. i think the site should be tolerant of others yet know when to say, enough, stop abusing the site. hope that helps, i rambled on a bit there didn't i.

as an afterthought. i'd probably;y make a good zombie poet, i've no formal education and i'm opinionated to the nth degree, and don't know an awful lot about poetry. but i don't want to be a zombie. i want to help myself return to the living.

sj is a poet, he just doesn't write poetry -- some people just make the world a better place for being in it. (He is paying me by the word)

I seek to find some common ground. To give an example, you know? Of something we're all mostly familiar with. For critical thinking. The symbols of Christianity, for instance, and the social implications of them. Religious issues that figure in the symbols of Blake's poems, including the one given as an example in this post.

The issue we all seem to agree on about "zombie" poets is that they think they're writing poems and creating out of their own ideas and feelings, when it's mostly stanza-looking blocks of what might be their ideas and feelings, but only because they haven't had any good opportunities to have those things tested.

How do they come to have those things tested? Unless they stray from their comfort zone? And most will never do that, unless some shocking event takes place that in some way conditions them in another or other directions? For instance, if one of us, or anyone, goes to their comfort zone, and says something they don't understand or like, they simply will ignore what you say or think you're some weirdo. And a weirdo is scary and embarrassing. People don't want a weirdo in their comfort zone. Nor do they want to say anything that might be considered weird, and be thought of as a weirdo.

I think these are obvious things I'm saying. And obvious, familiar things are most often taken for granted. They're obvious truths, or truisms. We have to destroy the truth without lies.

(11-25-2012, 08:15 AM)Leanne Wrote:  The internet brought not a resurgence, but an unholy resurrection. We have zombie poets who feed on validation, which is just as well since brains are in disturbingly short supply.

I found the Blake comments fascinating, and actually I have seen this misunderstanding of whom the poetic I refers. Beyond that though, I liked your feeding on validation comment. I think that is the key trait of this sort of writer. They are narcissists. They relate everything through some cracked internal lens that skews their perspective. It has to always be about me.

Good insight Leanne.

this Blake thing...it's me you're talking about isn't it....i tried, i really did but Blake had never been explained to me before

(11-28-2012, 07:28 AM)billy Wrote:  this Blake thing...it's me you're talking about isn't it....i tried, i really did but Blake had never been explained to me before

It's because you never keep your bloody pole veiled

(11-25-2012, 08:15 AM)Leanne Wrote:  I wrote this a while back, on another site -- a few things I've seen recently have reminded me of it:

Is poetry dead?  Who cares?  How many times have we had this discussion?  No, it's not dead, you cry.  There's more poetry being written now than there ever was.  Look around you.  The internet is a marvel of communication.  Poets, poets everywhere and something about slimy things.

Blah.  Poetry didn't go through an amazing resurgence with the coming of the internet; what surged was people's ability to get in other people's faces without ever having to properly commit to any kind of relationship.  This nice safe little interface created a haven for the imagination, but there was a problem: imaginations just aren't what they used to be.  As a consequence of two or three generations of being told precisely what to think, how to act, who to vote for and so forth etc ad infinitum, "creativity" has come to mean "see what else is around that you like and think you can manage, then copy it".  The personal diary became the public blog, and poetry in the key of I was soon de rigueur.

I recently tried an experiment with a group of poets who professed to be -- as they always do -- interested in learning.  For discussion I posted a couple of very well known "classic" poems, the first being Blake's A Poison Tree.  If you're not familiar with it, google it.  It's a poem with fairly straightforward metaphors, written in such a way that it should provoke quite a lot of philosophical discussion and speculation.  Instead the prevalent responses were something along the lines of "Blake is bad, why would he do such a thing?" and "how can an apple kill someone?"  Before you shake your head, consider why these are not stupid responses but the result of conditioning.  Let's first look at the I in poetry.  Once a narrative device that we'd have had no trouble separating from the writer him/herself (do we really think Huck Finn wrote his own story?), it's become the only perspective that seems to matter in poetry and must be true.  The I can't lie.  And, it seems, the I most especially cannot be tangled up with metaphor.  How can one thing be another thing? That's just not authentic.  Authenticity means, it seems, a stream of emotional responses to life changing events with arbitrary line breaks to make it look like a poem should.  God forbid we should lie in our poetry, we're so very honest in every other aspect of our lives after all.

The internet brought not a resurgence, but an unholy resurrection.  We have zombie poets who feed on validation, which is just as well since brains are in disturbingly short supply.

It is interesting to note that the Greeks made the god of lying and the god of creativity the same for a reason.  The foundation of every bit of creativity in the world is the lie - as things that aren't are lied into existence and then they are.

Some truths can never be told except through lies.

---

(11-27-2012, 04:33 PM)cidermaid Wrote:  I guess for me the key question to put forward for myself and directed at anyone running a poetry site is: Is this (the appearance of zombie poets), a problem that we need to manage or deal with and if so...How do we manage or deal with the problem?

zombie poets, like other zombies, are best avoided.
If necessary I think you can kill one with a silver bullet
or a stake through the heart.