Which is more important?

[milo]

Got to love those explanatory preludes (correct punctuation and spelling optional).

yah, Dennis had a thing for the explanatory preludes but what I like about them is, if you read them and you are not brain dead, you come the the inescapable conclusion that poetry is /not/ about splattering your unique ~feelings~ onto a page but about mastering a craft, one as difficult and worthy as any art, to the point that you can write about the 'commonality' of feelings in a way that reading about it is a rich experience.

---

Creativity - despite what you may think - is not about "doing what you want"
but about finding forms appropriate to your mode of expression. And -
honestly - there are plenty (and I mean PLENTY) of people writing "poems"
every day. There is no shortage of dabblers and do-nothings and future
Hallmark card writers. So I don't much care if someone is discouraged from
the task at hand, since anyone that easily deterred is not about to make the
lifelong committment poetry demands of its adherents.

dmh