Simplicity in Poetry

[ellajam]

1. Always identify your audience.
2. Always write to your audience.
3. Always.

This is the first post that has moved me to respond because for me that's just not the way I go about writing and the way it's stated as rules irks me. I write a poem because a thought comes to mind in what to me is an interesting combination of words. Thinking about it and playing with it becomes a poem. This does not make me indifferent to responses to the poem, I'm glad to have them at all and especially like when someone can suggest an improvement or sees something in it I didn't and I like interacting with people about the poem. So an audience is nice to have but that is not what makes me want to spend my time writing poems, it's the crafting of it I enjoy. It is not a diary even if there is no (or an unknown) audience.

1. Always identify your audience.
2. Always write to your audience.
3. Always.

I heartily disagree with this.
Just write a great poem, the audience is of no consequence .

Then you have already identified your audience as yourself, and your opinion is the only one that matters. Pretty small world to live in, but if it works for you that's great.

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Glad you see you changed your mind about that one!

I might have had to break you.

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Respectfully (please don't beat me ), isn't this the same as saying that your ultimate audience is yourself? I don't mean that in a bad way, it just sounds like you've identified your audience. If you're not writing for anyone else, you're writing for yourself. I think this is noble, but I'm far too egotistical to not want accolades from the masses (said 75% tongue in cheek)!

I feel like it's kind of a tree falling in the forest and no one hearing it situation -- how do you know it's a great poem if no one else reads it?

I also heartily disagree with this. You write to create a poem. From there what happens, happens.
You would deliberately make a poem worse to pander to an audience?
Anyway, if you write a great poem the audience will find it.

Writing to a specific audience is not pandering, nor does it necessarily make a poem worse. There is no causal relationship there. Also, in writing, the formula of "if you build it, they will come" does not work. You have to do the work. You have to put your writing out there. The responsibility is on you to find your audience, not the other way around. But, one can only conclude from your previous responses, your audience seems to be yourself, so if that is the case, I suppose your audience did find you insofar as you have found yourself. Again, I don't have anything against that perspective as long as it works for you.

My bold. No, while maybe that is the only conclusion you can come to, that is not the only conclusion others can come to from this member's posts. There is a difference between writing a poem that only you can understand and writing regardless of an audience. Whether or not a wide audience finds a good poem does not make it more or less. Plenty of good art is not appreciated in its time or at all, that doesn't make the artist less skilled or the art less worthwhile.

For a wide audience, curing cancer would be nice.