07-14-2014, 04:41 AM
"But it's meant to be abstract!" you cry, haughtily deriding the critics who demands something concrete by which to grasp your poem. Such Philistines! How dare they ask for a clue as if your poem is a cypher to be unravelled by the unimaginative? Some of the greatest poetry throughout history has been abstract, just like yours...
... actually, nothing like yours. Abstract poetry hints at meaning through imagery, sound, word texture, rhythm etc, but it has a cohesive thread that builds an emotive response in the reader. A poem may use concrete images yet still be abstract, just as a painting might.
What most beginners (and I mean people who haven't been writing seriously, with attention to editing, for more than a few months) write are poems filled with vague ideas or abstractions like love, hate, good, evil, success, failure, pain, happiness... those are all important concepts in poetry, but they have no fixed meaning and impart very little (if anything at all) to the reader. It's all very well to say that the reader should make his/her own meaning, but there needs to be something to build on other than random guesses. Poetry, like all art, needs some form of context.
An incredibly talented painter could create a wonderfully-wrought landscape with trees and flowers and hills and streams that anyone in the world could interpret as being in their own area... because it could be anywhere, and it wouldn't be a masterpiece, it would be sold at a thrift shop.
Please don't write thrift shop poetry. The world has enough of it already.
... actually, nothing like yours. Abstract poetry hints at meaning through imagery, sound, word texture, rhythm etc, but it has a cohesive thread that builds an emotive response in the reader. A poem may use concrete images yet still be abstract, just as a painting might.
What most beginners (and I mean people who haven't been writing seriously, with attention to editing, for more than a few months) write are poems filled with vague ideas or abstractions like love, hate, good, evil, success, failure, pain, happiness... those are all important concepts in poetry, but they have no fixed meaning and impart very little (if anything at all) to the reader. It's all very well to say that the reader should make his/her own meaning, but there needs to be something to build on other than random guesses. Poetry, like all art, needs some form of context.
An incredibly talented painter could create a wonderfully-wrought landscape with trees and flowers and hills and streams that anyone in the world could interpret as being in their own area... because it could be anywhere, and it wouldn't be a masterpiece, it would be sold at a thrift shop.
Please don't write thrift shop poetry. The world has enough of it already.
It could be worse