(05-06-2014, 11:07 AM)abu nuwas Wrote: Billy, there is something quite frightening about being constrained by ''people now think..'' or worries about what to-day's general consensus might be. Such things are the bane of contemporary writing, imperceptibly pushed by peer-pressure into a kind of sameyness, each thing different, yet somehow the same. Illiterate educators in cursed Creative Writing schools shoulder a part of the blame; the rest is that tendency of people to lazily get in step with the marching morons. If you catch my drift.i say it as a guideline. it's like cliche. most people see cliche as something to avoid because they've heard/read it before. now and again it works but as a rule of thumb [for me] a cliched poem is a sign of a less well written poem.
inverted syntax [for me] has been and come and gone. if i read a sonnet of old, i know some, probably many of the lines will be inverted at the end. when i see the same thing in a modern poem it reads as not so good. it isn't how my brain is set up to think. i have myself on many occasion used inversion because i went with the majority of how poets wrote poetry. i saw that it wasn't my language after a while and try to remove any i do. some still slips through but i don't want it to slip through. the same as i don't want cliche to slip through. we're a workshop. do we say "hey nice inversion, btw your poems sucks" inversion {again for me} is most often an indicator that the poem will have a lot of faults. more than not the poem does have more than a nominal amount of shite littered through it. i've written enough shite to last me a life time and am to some small degree a connoisseur of shite poetry. when we {i say} such and such a line is inverted, i so because the reading of such a line seems odd to me.
yes, i learned this because others told me the same thing but i'm a big boy now and found that i agreed with them. not everyone needs to agree or accept but i have a sneaky feeling that those who continue to write yoderish text will forever bee doomed to being a newb poet. there may be a gem that comes along now and again but they'll be very few and far between. no one who normally writes with inversion on this site can call themselves good poets. but the poets who are good poets on this site and i don't see myself as one of them, don't invert unless for a very good reason is it.
there's inversion and inversion there is. the latter screams out "put me the right fucking way round" the former silently say " i'm a clever bastard"
i just read your ville and i'd say it's of the latter style. i enjoyed it and saw little problem re inversion. to me inversion sticks it's tongue out at you and slaps you in the face with a wet fish as it pees it's pants
(05-06-2014, 11:59 AM)ellajam Wrote: I understand Loretta's reluctance to give up her reversed syntax.
Here is one of mine where I loved the sound of those lines that folded in on themselves. My attempt to straighten out the syntax resulted in a lifeless blob. A better poet may have pulled it off, but I guess a better poet wouldn't have written the original. Still, it became worse, not better.
I've been learning IP lately and trying to keep a natural speech pattern. It's fun and interesting, but poetically I think it's the step backwards that hopefully will lead to two forward.
I agree with billy that it's important to recognize inversion in my work and if I want to use it i need to control it to the poem's advantage.