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I was giving some thought to the article Leanne shared on how to know if your poetry sucks. It made me reflect on why reading good poetry is so important. I think of it like the TV show Hell's Kitchen. Gordon Ramsey usually has a segment where he blindfolds the contestants and has them identify ingredients. His palate is trained to taste everything. He gets more out of food than I imagine I would. The contestants who can't identify tastes are criticized. How can they not know food and be chefs. I think it is like that with poetry. When we start out we can barely identify the flavors. The more we read the more refined our palate gets. People sometimes confuse refined tastes with a lack of raw authenticity, but I think its more like a person who ate macaroni and cheese all their life suddenly realizing there's more out there. Reading brings you that.
Just some thoughts.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.--Jon Anderson
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That's a pretty good analogy, Todd (only chefs make more money than we do!)
A chef doesn't know how to make every dish in the world -- but a true professional will, when confronted with something new, use the knowledge he/she already has to create a very passable interpretation of the original recipe, with a personalised twist.
And in a similar vein, sausages and chips are fine for a quick family dinner but I wouldn't serve that up to visitors. If I'm going to share my food with others, I want it to be well prepared so that they can enjoy it and leave feeling satisfied.
It could be worse
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true true.
"People sometimes confuse refined tastes with a lack of raw authenticity"
I think people often have a fundamental lack of understanding of the nature of creativity. When you think about it EVERYTHING we create comes from somewhere, every thought we have has been given to us by those who taught us a language to think in, and those who we have listened to and read.
Creativity is taking two unrelated concepts (that come from others) and combining them in a clever new way that creates new meaning. If you don't have a great range of material to draw upon, your combinations will be extremely limited (hence the amount of cliche in new poetry). COMPLETELY new creations can never happen, that's like creating something from nothing. Its an impossibility, its like having an effect without it's cause.
a great talk by John Cleese on creativity:
http://vimeo.com/18913413
If something happens and you can remedy it, Why worry?
And if something happens that you can't remedy, Still why worry?
www.benjack.co.nz
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I'm not sure that I agree with everything that Benthejack has written, although on a non poetry related aside there is a sub discussion going into the whole where did everything come from then that, i would say amen to. (I'm not sure if you intended to preach it...go get them tiger...there is nothing new under the sun).
As a cider maker i can really relate to Todd's analogy. I think that there is such a thing as a natural gift or inbuilt ability within all of us for various things in life. But equally it is possible to be trained and to become skilled in something outside of your natural inclinations.
Sorry but i will have to put this into a frame work of something i know in order to answer; I have a naturally good palate for flavour profiling that i discovered by accident. Within this natural ability i still had to fine hone my skill. Equally my particular palate has areas of strength and others of weakness. (my particular thing is to work on the raw cider and be able to visualise what the finished article will turn out like…the next stage is to be able to bright blend the cider once it has been blended and filtered to adjust for the sweetness / acidity balance…i'm not so good at this stage. my daughter on the other hand …who hates alcohol - i think she might have been switched at birth - can taste any change in the degree of sweetness / acidity balance).
I used to do flavour profiling training with the staff to train up a team, to asses new product development and QC issues. it took months to work through the course using blind sampling and get everyone trained to be able to pick out the key note flavours and then to standardise the notation of this into a common text. Even after all this work some people just didn't have any "feel" for it. They could not seem to learn how to go quiet and listen to their taste perceptions. I think all of this equates to my understanding of the process of working with poetry. Within this forum we have some master craft word blenders who can root out the finer nuances of a poem and pick out any off notes. We have others who have some skills in the last stage of word blending, the final balance of word placement and grammar. Perhaps we have a few with the equivalent of a Michelin star or two.
I just want to be able to improve my craft and to do that i agree with what Todd said about tasting the work of others and working alongside then as an apprentice would in a kitchen.
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you can have money but if you don't know what it is you'll wipe are arse with it.
creativity is the same. we all have it, some are more creative than others but if you have no pencils paints etc, it does'nt matter how creative you are you can't paint, same if you have no idea how to mix or make colors.
how do you create poetry if you have no or vey little vocabulary, if you have no understanding of syntax or poetic device. more often or not you'll write gibberish...i know this from experience
sedom did the great artist create something out of thin air, often they were inspired, often they set up models to copy. often they stole ideas and built on them. creativity on it own is only ever enough if have the tools you need to create in the medium of your choice. we have brains for a reason that is for much more than creativity. the brain allows us to craft creativity, without craft,. creativity stays in the realms of monkey paintings. now and again they look nice but there done with rhyme or reason. often the monkey eats the fuckin paint
Creativity doesn't limit itself to art. Apparently nobody fell for the link.
People can come up with something new. The first ever poets and painters had to start somewhere. Language had to start somewhere. These days, we have resources, we can learn techniques from those that already exist. But we can search for new things, or new ideas in other areas, then bring those into artistic form.
No one I know personally will read my writings anymore. I've been told it's all gibberish. And when they don't know any literary allusions or how to look at symbolism: it is gibberish.
